A bottom-up approach is taken to creating a condensed container, in which an automatic determination is made of the minimum set of requirements and dependencies, in forms of libraries and packages, for deployed applications/services and any corresponding user-specified content. The most fitting libraries and packages are merged with the applications/services, and the merged results are containerized using a minimized version of a container base image. Specialized unikernel generation includes automatically determining the minimum set of requirements and dependencies, in forms of libraries and packages, for the deployed applications/services and any corresponding user-specified content. The best available library operating system is identified, and compilation occurs to generate the unikernel. In effect, optimized (in terms of most fitting to applications/services, for any combination of size, speed, resource utilization, and performance) containers and unikernel images from applications/services by leveraging traditional unikernel technologies are produced.