VMware announced a new open source project call Project Photon today. The full announcement call be seen here. Essentially Project Photon is a lightweight Linux operating system built to support Docket and rkt (formerly Rocket) containers. The footprint is less than 400MB and can run containers immediately upon instantiation. I had heard rumors the announcement today was going to include some sort of OS, but I was not very excited about it until I started reading the material being released prior to the launch event in a few hours.
Having seen the demo and read the material, my mind went into overdrive for the possibilities both open source projects offer organizations who are venturing down the Cloud Native Apps (or Platform 3) road. I believe VMware has a huge opportunity here to cement themselves as the foundation for running robust, secure and enterprise-ready Cloud Native Applications. If you think about the performance gains vSphere 6.0 has provided, and then look at how they are playing in the OpenStack space with both VIO and NSX, the choice becomes obvious.
The area of focus now needs to be on tying all of the pieces together to offer organizations an enterprise-class end-to-end Platform-as-a-Service solution. This is where, I believe, the VMware Big Data Extensions framework should play an enormous part. The framework already allows deployment of Hadoop, Mesos and Kubernetes clusters. Partner the framework with Project Photon and you now have a minimal installation VM that can be launched within seconds with VMFork. From there, the resource plugin Virtual Elephant launched today could be mainstreamed (and improved) to allow for the entire deployment of a Mesos stack, backed by Project Photon, through the open source API OpenStack offers with Heat.
Epic win!
There is still work VMware could do with the Big Data Extensions framework to improve its capabilities, especially with newcomers SequenceIQ and their Cloudbreak offering stiff competition. Expanding BDE to be able to deploy clusters beyond an internal vSphere environment, but also to the major public cloud environments — including their own vCloud Air — will be key going forward. The code for BDE is already an open source project — by launching these two new open source projects they are showing the open source community they are serious.
This is a really exciting time in virtualization and I just got even more excited today!
