Photon – Minimal Linux Container Host | Hacker News Reader

Photon – Minimal Linux Container Host

vmware.github.io

81 pointsfrostmatthew17 comments

The ISO is 959 megabytes. I wouldn't call this minimal.

That's a superb point. I was assuming this would be Debian netinst size (222MB) and wouldn't have known otherwise if it wasn't for your comment.

Makes me wonder how minimal it really is. :-)

Installing this in a VM it appears there are four installation options: 1. Photon OS (Micro) 2. Photon Container OS (Minimal) 3. Photon Full OS (All) 4. Photon Custom OS

Looking at the Photon Getting Started Guide (for Fusion)[1] it looks like the same ISO is intended to support multiple types of installation, so it is not the ISO that is necessarily optimized but the resulting OS (based on the selection in the installation) that is supposed to be.

[1] Page 10 of https://vmware.github.io/photon/assets/files/getting_started...

This seems to be operating in the same space as CoreOS, but doesn't list any differentiators. How does it compare?

It isn't really – this is more akin to Boot2Docker https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker.

It is a minimal linux install intended for non-native hosts to run Docker containers, say on a Mac or in a VMware cluster. You could use it for production workloads, certainly, but it doesn't provide any of the management tools that CoreOS provides.

For one thing, it has about a hundred ™ symbols. Maybe lawyers are an untapped market for containers. It's also propping up Pivotal's fork of Docker that doesn't get much love.

> fork of Docker

wat

https://github.com/docker/docker/commit/a27b4b8cb8e838d03a99...

Jan 18, 2013

https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/garden/commit/9c79...

Dec 6, 2011

Garden is not a docker fork, though it is capable of running docker images.

Great observation on the ™

I think the idea for photon is to let existing vSphere infrastructure manage the container lifecycle.

CoreOS appears to be aiming towards becoming a platform to build distributed systems on top of which happens to be container centric.

From a quick review, this looks more like RedHat Atomic than CoreOS. CoreOS uses an A/B partition swap for atomic updates while the vmware OS uses RPM (god knows why). Also, this seems to be huge compared to the minimal (20MB) option of just using RancherOS. IF I can use CoreOS and get ETCD, Fleet and both Docker and App containers, why would I use something from VMware ? Does anyone see any value in using this thing ?, The entire point o using something like CoreOS or Red Hat atomic with Docker is to stop paying VMware thousands of dollars for each server. why would I use a VMware OS on a VMware hypervisor when I can just use Docker on CoreOS on physical HW and get better performance and more flexibility for free ? And the entire security thing seems like noise. the real security issue is what running inside the VM and not the cross VM security. containers can be made more secure and more manageable than vmware, simply because they can be automated better.

>The entire point o using something like CoreOS or Red Hat atomic with Docker is to stop paying VMware thousands of dollars for each server.

No, it isn't.

Containers (and app containers) are not competitors to, replacements for, or equivalent to traditional virt. While there's some overlap in cases where there's deployment from golden templates or glance images or AMIs or whatever just to get isolated apps, traditional virtualization and containers are complementary technologies.

Not sure if you're trolling, but I really hope you are...

I'm less excited by the distribution than the package system. VMware wrote a dnf/yum replacement in pure C, with no python dependencies:

https://github.com/vmware/photon/blob/master/tyum.md

This is what makes it possible for Photon to be so small, but still have yum-like features.

They should add "why is this FAQ a PDF?" to their FAQ.

Why not just image Alpine Linux[1] for an awesome minimal Linux, or RancherOS[2] for a minimal Docker host (or CoreOS) and be done with it?

Kinda reminds me of Unbreakable Linux.. just because you can doesn't mean you should.

1. http://www.alpinelinux.org/

2. http://rancher.com/rancher-os/

From the FAQ[1]

For vSphere customers, Project Photon can extend the capabilities of the software-defined data center such as security, identity and resource management to containerized workloads. Organizations can then leverage a single infrastructure architecture for both traditional and cloudnative Apps, and leverage existing investments in tools, skills and technologies

Project Photon can deliver performance through kernel tuning to remove redundant caching between the Linux kernel and the vSphere hypervisor, and advanced security services through network micro-segmentation delivered by VMware NSX

[1] https://vmware.github.io/photon/assets/files/photon_faqs.pdf

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