As a newbie to Photon, I have the following questions:
It looks like VMware is trying to create a parallel container technology to Docker. Since docker is more mature at this stage, is there any benefit/advantage to using photon?
I understand that one can potentially create an AWS like environment on premise with photon (takes care of port exposure since I can spin up a new service instance on a new photon container - bare metal vs pulling a docker image).
Does it add another layer of complexity to manage /maintain? Docker can be run on minimal linux on the host. So what do I gain? It looks like it is a better way of partitioning a server into smaller VMs.
Sorry, for the rambling questions. I am not sure if there is a value add apart from AWS like environment I can create with it. even, that I am not sure. Thanks
photon is being used by vmware in many contexts now. Not sure what exactly you are referring to in this thread.
[Photon OS] Photon OS isn't a Docker replacement. Photon OS should be considered a streamlined OS designed to support containers (think about CoreOS, RH Atomic etc). On top of it you could use Docker and/or RKT.
[Photon Platform] This is a brand new IaaS-ish platform designed and optimized to support next generation apps based on container technologies and microservices patterns. On top of Photon Platform the various tenants can deploy their container orchestration environments of choice (think Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos etc). If you will, this is the "on-prem" AWS EC2 you were referring to (probably).
[Photon Controller] Photon Controller is the ... controller inside the Photon Platform. It's a distributed management/control plane that manage a set of hypervisor hosts. Photon OS instances run on top of the hypervisor hosts managed by Photon Controller. In the end thse Photon OS instances will be what Swarm/Kubernetes/Mesos will orchestrate as "container hosts".
HTH. Massimo.