Which of these is a characteristic of a container?

A container is fundamentally designed to encapsulate an application along with all of its dependencies, which may include the runtime, binaries, libraries, and any other necessary components that the application requires to run effectively. This encapsulation allows developers to create an isolated environment for their applications, ensuring consistency across various deployment environments—whether it's local developer machines, testing environments, or production servers. By bundling the application and its dependencies together, containers eliminate issues related to version mismatches and dependency conflicts, making it easier to manage applications in various scenarios.

The essence of containers lies in their ability to provide lightweight and portable packages that can easily run in different environments without modification, thus streamlining the development and deployment process. This directly correlates with the selection as the correct answer. Other choices either describe broader cloud concepts or infrastructure components that aren't specific to the defining traits of containers.