1. A method comprising: in a cloud computing platform comprising one or more computing systems, identifying, in a runtime environment, a software package that is associated with a software application, wherein the software package includes platform-independent instructions that are configured to perform at least one computational task and that are compiled from application source code associated with the software application, and wherein the platform-independent instructions have a format that is not specific to any particular hardware platform provided by the one or more computing systems, and wherein the platform-independent instructions comprise instructions that are not native to or executable by any particular hardware platform provided by the one or more computing systems; selecting, from the one or more computing systems, a computing system to perform the at least one computational task; providing, by the selected computing system, a container in which to perform the at least one computational task; obtaining, by the selected computing system, in the runtime environment, platform-dependent instructions that have been converted from the platform-independent instructions, wherein the platform-dependent instructions have a format that is specific to a hardware platform provided by the selected computing system, and wherein the platform-dependent instructions comprise instructions that are native to and executable by the selected computing system; prior to execution of the platform-dependent instructions, configuring the container, wherein configuring the container comprises applying one or more security controls to the container, the one or more security controls being configured to restrict access of the container to only a group of resources provided by the selected computing system; and executing, by the selected computing system and in the container, in the runtime environment, the platform-dependent instructions to perform the at least one computational task.