Encapsulated application templates are provided for containerized application software development. An exemplary method for managing a plurality of services in a containerized application program comprises: creating an application template of the containerized application program, the application template comprising an identifier of a current version of each of the plurality of services, dependencies of the given service with other services of the application, runtime parameters and configurations of the given service; generating a transferable platform independent self-contained machine-readable token comprising the application template; and providing the transferable platform independent self-contained machine-readable token comprising the application template to another device as a common entry point to instantiate the containerized application program.