An application development system allows developers of software system to manage infrastructure resources during the development and testing process. The application development system allows users to define application containers that comprise components including source code, binaries, and virtual databases used for the application. An application container can be associated with policies that control various aspects of the actions taken using the application container including constraints and access control. The application development system enforces the policies for actions taken by users for the application containers. The encapsulation of policies with the application containers allows users of the application containers to take actions including creating virtual databases, provisioning virtual databases, and the like without requiring system administrators to manage resource issues.