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In recent years, the role of cloud computing in the information technology (IT) industry has been growing steadily, partly because IT developers are becoming empowered to provision, manage, and adjust IT resources through simple application programming interfaces. This enables the easy creation and manipulation of software defined environments consisting of server, storage, network, software, and the supporting management functions. Model-based deployment and management technologies that are based on upcoming standards such as the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) allow for describing models of different kinds of workloads such as topology patterns and management plans. The term "pattern" refers to a description of components of a service, e. g., an application or infrastructure, and their relationships. This approach provides a flexible combination of declarative and imperative models of workloads that can be seamlessly integrated with automation frameworks such as Chef for task-level automation as well as management services to drive resource orchestration and optimization. In this paper, we explain how the aforementioned concepts are used as foundational elements of the software defined environment. We use an actual example motivated by a real customer scenario, and we explain the relation to the IBM Cloud Computing Reference Architecture and how it is applied within IBM cloud implementations.