Bryan Cantrill is the CTO of Joyent - a software and services company based in San Francisco that specializes in cloud computing and virtualization.

In this interview, Cantrill explains how Linux-based application containers work, and why they are making virtual machines obsolete. The advantages of the new approach, pioneered by companies like Docker, include application portability, improved resource efficiency and lower I/O latency.

The conversation took place at the DCD Internet conference in San Francisco, which concluded on Monday.