It’s clear that containers are here to stay. At VMworld 2015, a panel of leaders in the container technology revolution sat down to talk about the opportunities with containers. Panelists Brandon Philips, CTO of CoreOS, Inc.; Nick Weaver, director of Intel SDI-X; and Sheng Liang, cofounder and CEO of Rancher Labs Inc., talked with Brian Gracely, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

Reinventing operating systems

All three panel members have been on the cutting-edge of container technology. Each person sees the ways containers can be used in operating systems, because there have always been problems with how to put together large systems and maintain them.

“We saw an opportunity to kind of reinvent how operating systems are put together, and in order to do this, containers are necessary,” said Philips.

Opportunities and challenges with containers

There are huge opportunities and challenges to the developing world of containers.

“[Containers are] a universally available, highly efficient packaging and run-time format,” explained Liang. “We can really build everything optimized around it.”

Although containers are easy to package, it will be important to build more structure platforms to manage them in the future, the panel added. And this will be the challenge moving forward. As container usage moves into large-scale production, then the demand for large-scale management will come.

What people want from containers

Containers are allowing people to think about applications in completely different way.

“People want to be able to have the same kind of orchestration happen whether they’re running behind a firewall, a public cloud, or whatever platform they’re on,” said Philips. “With application containers, for the first time we’ve actually have an opportunity to make that happen.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE