—This paper introduces a generic approach for managing automatically applications elasticity. The proposed solution addresses a noticeably wider scope of use-cases and does not depend on the underlying execution environment. It consists of: (i) a model and a formalism used for specifying valid applicative architectures (or elasticity scenarios) according to the resources allocated to the application. The originality of this first contribution lies in the association of a component model with a set oriented query language; (ii) a defeasible reasoning-based planning algorithm that computes the target applicative architecture from the model and elasticity requests; (iii) a first qualitative and quantitative evaluation that highlights the relevance and the viability of the proposed approach.