Policy Engine for Governing Cloud Environments

Embodiments govern cloud environments using a policy engine. A plurality of policy definitions for governing a plurality of managed environments can be received at a policy engine, each policy definition including one or more conditions and one or more actions, where the managed environments implement cloud based virtual machines that host cloud based applications. Events that relate to one or more of the managed environments can be received at the policy engine. Conditions for the policy definitions can be evaluated by the policy engine, where conditions for a first policy definition are triggered based on one or more of the received events. Based on the evaluating, one or more actions of the first policy definition can be performed, the one or more actions changing a first managed environment that is governed by the first policy definition.