A large number of cloud providers offer diverse types of cloud services for constructing complex ”cloud-native” software. However, there is a lack of supporting tools and mechanisms for accelerating the development of cloud-native software-defined elastic systems (SESs) based on elasticity capabilities of cloud services. In this paper we introduce QUELLE – a framework for evaluating and recommending SES deployment configurations. QUELLE presents models for describing the elasticity capabilities of cloud services and capturing elasticity requirements of SESs. Based on that QUELLE introduces novel functions and algorithms for quantifying the elasticity capabilities of cloud services. QUELLE’s algorithms can recommend SES deployment configurations from cloud services that both provide the required elasticity, and fulfill cost, quality, and resource requirements, and thus can be incorporated into different phases of the development of SESs. We present several experiments based on real-world cloud services for the development of an elastic machine-to-machine data-as-a-service system.