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