Distributed applications in the cloud are composed of a set of virtual machines running a set of interconnected software components. In this context, setting up, (re)configuring, and monitoring these applications is a real burden since a software application may depend on several remote software and virtual machine configurations. These management tasks involve many complex protocols, which fully automate these tasks while preserving application consistency. In this paper, we focus on a self-configuration protocol, which is able to configure a whole distributed application without requiring any centralized server. The high degree of parallelism involved in this protocol makes its design complicated and error-prone. In order to check that this protocol works as expected, we specify it in LOTOS NT and verify it using the CADP toolbox. The use of these formal techniques and tools helped to detect a bug in the protocol, and served as a workbench to experiment with several possible communication models.