Techniques are disclosed that permit storage and availability operations, such as backup and restore, snapshot and cloning, application disaster recovery, and reporting and analytics, to be performed for stateful containerized applications. In one embodiment, a container cluster service is configured to create application instance objects that capture metadata associated with containerized applications and that (optionally) specify scripts to be run before and/or after taking an application consistent snapshot and/or an order in which to take snapshots. Application instances having the configurations specified in the application instance object may then be deployed. In addition, the container cluster service may use an application instance object to create a snapshot of a deployed application instance that includes a point-in-time copy of configuration information specified by the application instance object and reference(s) to snapshot volume(s) created from volume(s) associated with the application instance as part of the snapshot operation.