Today’s cloud data center infrastructures are not even near being able to cope with the enormous and rapidly vary-ing capacity demands that will be reality in a near future. So far, very little is understood about how to transform today’s data centers (being large, power-hungry facilities, and operated through heroic efforts by numerous adminis-trators) into a self-managed, dynamic, and dependable infrastructure, constantly delivering expected QoS with rea-sonable operation costs and acceptable carbon footprint for large-scale services with sometimes dramatic variations in capacity demands. In this paper, we discuss some of the major challenges for resource-optimized cloud data cen-ter. We propose a new research area called Cloud Control, which is a control theoretic approach to a range of cloud management problems, aiming to transform today´s static and energy consuming cloud data centers into self-managed, dynamic, and dependable infrastructures, constantly delivering expected quality of service with acceptable operation costs and carbon footprint for large-scale services with varying capacity demands.