Photon, Photon, Photon

calendar Oct 19, 2016 · 1 min read · vmware photon linux  ·
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VMware’s cloud-native application stack is here, and it uses several things called “Photon”. In this quick post, I’ll have a look at what’s what in the stack and how the components of this container-optimised enterprise cloud platform fit together.

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At the base level is Photon OS. This is a Linux distribution created from the ground up by VMware for this infrastructure.

The Photon Controller runs on Photon OS. This is a web-scale control plane which manages the workloads.

Photon Platform is the entire stack. This includes the Photon Controllers but also encompasses the underlying ESX Hypervisor, Network Virtualisation, and Storage underneath. Photon Platform is designed to be multi-tenant, so within one platform multiple tenants can be allocated resources using a hierarchical model and then individual tenants can divide their resources up across projects.