MANAGING MULTICAST SERVICE CHAINS IN A CLOUD ENVIRONMENT

Techniques for provisioning multicast chains in a cloud-based environment are described herein. In an embodiment, an orchestration system sends a particular model of a distributed computer program application comprising one or more sources, destinations, and virtualized appliances for initiation by one or more host computers to a software-defined networking (SDN) controller. The SDN controller determines one or more locations for the virtualized appliances and generates a particular updated model of the distributed computer program application, the updated model comprising the one or more locations for the virtualized appliances. The SDN controller sends the updated model of the distributed computer program application to the orchestration system. The orchestration system uses the particular updated model to generate a mapping of virtualized appliances to available host computers of the one or more host computers based, at least in part, on the particular updated model of the distributed computer program application. Using the mapping of virtualized appliances to available host computers, the orchestration system sends instructions for initiating the virtualized appliances on the available host computers to one or more cloud management systems.