The underlying file system might be able to dedupe the data. I remember playing around with linux containers and ZFS, where the base image was a snapshot, so on

The underlying file system might be able to dedupe the data. I remember playing around with linux containers and ZFS, where the base image was a snapshot, so only the changes to the base image take up hdd space. With modern solid state disks able to read several GB per second and with 1TB capacity, and Gbit Internet, i do not worry much if the app itself is 300MB big. If you skip the GUI the app should be fairly small - even when statically linked, then I use Linux namespaces for isolation, so no need to ship the entire OS with the app (which is a bit absurd imho. I wonder how many containers run old OS and risk container escape that would end up with root on the host, or the unnecessary extra virtualization layer killing the performance)