Cloud computing offers pay-per-use on-demand access to computer resources for hosting program execution environments for software service deployment. Management of cloud resources includes determining, based on current monitored resource availability, which part(s) of a computational infrastructure should host such program execution environments in a process called placement. Our work defines directives that lets consumers of cloud resources influence placement to express relationships between cloud services (orchestration) and deployment constraints to uphold for related service components, without surrendering the ultimate control over placement from the infrastructure owner. The infrastructure owner remains free to define their policies and placement optimization criteria, e.g., to consolidate work that needs to be done to as few physical host machines as possible for power savings reasons. We show how the placement process can be adjusted to take such influence into account and validate through simulations that the adjustments produce the correct result without too large computational impact on the placement process itself. Further, we present a technique for transferring large data files between cloud data centers that operate in (separate) cloud federations that avoids repeated transfers in a delegation chain between members of (different) cloud federations. Finally, we present a non-invasive and secret-preserving method of extracting monitoring data from a service deployed in a cloud federation, and a framework for making monitoring information available and understandable in spite of technical differences between monitoring systems used in cloud federations.