The Cloud computing paradigm emerged by establishing new resources provisioning and consumption models. Together with the improvement of resource management techniques, these models have contributed to an increase in the number of application developers that are strong supporters of partially or completely migrating their application to a highly scalable and pay-per-use infrastructure. In this paper we derive a set of functional and non-functional requirements and propose a process-based approach to support the optimal distribution of an application in the Cloud in order to handle fluctuating over time workloads. Using the TPC-H workload as the basis, and by means of empirical workload analysis and characterization, we evaluate the application persistence layer's performance under different deployment scenarios using generated workloads with particular behavior characteristics.