Cloud computing is continuously growing as a business model for hosting information and communication technology applications. Although on-demand resource consumption and faster deployment time make this model appealing for the enterprise, other concerns arise regarding the quality of service offered by the cloud. One major concern is the high availability of applications hosted in the cloud. This paper demonstrates the tremendous effect that the placement strategy for virtual machines hosting applications has on the high availability of the services provided by these applications. In addition, a novel scheduling technique is presented that takes into consideration the interdependencies between applications components and other constraints such as communication delay tolerance and resource utilization. The problem is formulated as a linear programming multi-constraint optimization model. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed solution improves the availability of the scheduled components compared to OpenStack Nova scheduler.