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Current cloud service offerings, i.e., Software-as-a-service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings are often provided as monolithic, one-size-fits-all solutions and give little or no room for customization. This limits the ability of Service-based Application (SBA) developers to configure and syndicate offerings from multiple SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS providers to address their application requirements. Furthermore, combining different independent cloud services necessitates a uniform description format that facilitates the design, customization, and composition. Cloud Blueprinting is a novel approach that allows SBA developers to easily design, configure and deploy virtual SBA payloads on virtual machines and resource pools on the cloud. We propose the Blueprint concept as a uniform abstract description for cloud service offerings that may cross different cloud computing layers, i.e., SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. To support developers with the SBA design and development in the cloud, this paper introduces a formal Blueprint Template for unambiguously describing a blueprint, as well as a Blueprint Lifecycle that guides developers through the manipulation, composition and deployment of different blueprints for an SBA. Finally, the empirical evaluation of the blueprinting approach within an EC’s FP7 project is reported and an associated blueprint prototype implementation is presented.