Perprogram

Perprogram is a concept in software engineering describing a design and operational discipline in which resources, configuration, and policy decisions are scoped to individual program instances rather than to a host, user, or shared service. The term emphasizes treating each program as an autonomous unit with its own lifecycle, isolation boundary, and accounting.

Applications include resource accounting in multi-tenant cloud platforms, where CPU time, memory, and I/O can be allocated and billed per program; security and sandboxing, where system calls and permissions are restricted at the program level; and configuration management, where different programs receive tailored settings such as limits, feature flags, and runtime parameters.

Implementation typically relies on clear program identity, robust isolation boundaries (such as OS processes, containers, or language runtimes), and lifecycle management to create, pause, resume, and destroy program state. Observability is important, with per-program metrics, logs, and traces to attribute behavior to the correct program.

Benefits include improved fault isolation, predictable performance, and more precise security controls; it can simplify debugging by localizing issues to a single program. Trade-offs involve operational overhead, potential resource fragmentation, and increased management complexity, especially in systems with many short-lived programs or frequent handoffs between programs.

History and usage notes: Perprogram is discussed in some industry discussions and research papers that examine per-application isolation and resource governance, but it remains less standardized than related concepts such as per-process isolation or per-container accounting. See also: isolation, multi-tenancy, resource accounting, sandboxing, containerization.