

VMware Photon: Minimal Linux Container Host - aaroneast1
https://github.com/vmware/photon

======
nailer
If vmware (the company) like money: just let me run containers on bare metal
using your management tools.

People don't want containers on VMs. They just want containers. There are many
reasons for that.

~~~
stephenr
The vast majority of people who seem to want containers, are those who have
embraced the idea that developers can manage servers because they can write
(or copy) a Dockerfile and push a container to a container service on AWS or
Google Cloud.

In those situations you specifically _do_ want containers on VMs because
Docker containers do _not_ provide the same level of security and isolation
that VMs do.

~~~
stock_toaster
I recall watching a talk (given by @bcantrill I think it was?) where SmartOS
had implemented the docker api, but ran the actual "container" via linux
emulation, inside a zone. I think they named it "lx branded zones" or
something similar.

I could see vmware doing something like that -- implementing the docker api,
but actually running containers on very lightweight vms, so they can leverage
their existing virt infrastructure (memory ballooning, cpu allocation,
migration, etc) with it.

~~~
stephenr
So you have a docker container inside Linux emulation inside a Solaris-style
zone on a SmartOS host.

This is the opposite of "turtles all the way down" \- it's like a veritable
layer cake of system isolation. It's the turducken of server systems.

~~~
stock_toaster
Not quite. Docker is just the api. So you just have linux emulation (which is
apparently some light weight api call mapping) inside a zone. So maybe ducken
without the turd? ;)

------
walterbell
Would be nice to have more detail on tyum,
[https://github.com/vmware/photon/blob/master/docs/tyum.md](https://github.com/vmware/photon/blob/master/docs/tyum.md)

 _" a new, open-source, yum-compatible package manager that will help make the
system as small as possible, but preserve the robust yum package management
capabilities."_

------
mey
Seems like it's the realization of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_enough_operating_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_enough_operating_system)

To me, for this to be widely successful it should work well across any VM
solution

------
pjmlp
OS/360 says hi.

------
FlyingSnake
_" It is designed to have a small footprint and boot extremely quickly on
VMware platforms."_

Look's like it's only for the VMWare platform.

~~~
walterclifford
> Look's like it's only for the VMWare platform.

The README also says "An official Vagrant box is available on Hashicorp Atlas,
to get started: vagrant init vmware/photon"[1] and they include instructions
for Google Compute Engine[2]. It may be optimized to run on a VMware product,
but doesn't seem that's a requirement.

[1] [https://github.com/vmware/photon](https://github.com/vmware/photon)

[2] [http://vmware.github.io/photon/](http://vmware.github.io/photon/)

