Patent attributes
Methods and apparatus for providing persistent execution environments for computation systems including but not limited to interactive computation systems. A service is provided that extends the notion of static containers to dynamically changing execution environments into which users can install code, add files, etc. The execution environments are monitored, and changes to an execution environment are automatically persisted to environment versions(s) so that code run in the execution environment can be run later or elsewhere simply by referring to the environment. There is no explicit build step for the user. Instead, incremental changes are added to environment versions which are stored and are ready to be used to instantiate respective execution environments on other compute instances.