VMware Cloud Native Application | Photon Platform
What’s VMware Cloud Native Application?
Operating System Level Virtualization or Container is one of most popular IT concepts during few past year and many companies are working on their native solutions for supporting container concept on their products such as operating systems like Microsoft or Red Hat and Oracle. VMware has introduced VMware Cloud Native Application to supporting container on virtualization platform.
VMware Cloud Native Application helps developers and operation administrators to create cloud applications quickly and securely.
VMware delivers the Cloud Native Application by Photon Platform. Photon Platform is a Operating System Level Virtualization platform that deliver container on virtual servers based on Photon OS and ESXi.
Photon Platform
VMware Photon Platform is a container-optimized cloud platform which delivers on-demand tools and services for developers to build, test, and run modern applications while enabling IT to retain security, control and performance of data center infrastructure.
Photon Platform
Purpose-built for cloud-native applications with integrated container infrastructure support, Photon Platform is a fully API-driven, multi-tenant platform which brings the scale, performance and features previously accessible only to hyper-scale web companies into enterprise data centers. It leverages industry-leading compute, networking, and storage technologies to bring best-in-class performance, reliability and ease-of-use for cloudnative workloads.
Photon Platform | Key Features
- Production-grade, fully supported Kubernetes distribution with full life-cycle management and pod-based network virtualization
- Comprehensive compute, storage, networking, security, and operations
- Granular multi-tenancy and access management for resource isolation and security throughout the stack
- Highly-available control plane for web scale deployments
- Robust Docker registry via Harbor, an open-source container registry server designed for enterprise
- Support for Docker containers, including enterprise service registry and authentication
- Integration with Pivotal Cloud Foundry • Simple-to-use API and CLI tools • Rich HTML5 web interface for management and consumption
- Optimized for high churn container environments and large number of concurrent API requests
Photon Platform | Key Components
- Photon Controller – A scale-out control plane that turns compute hosts into an easy-to-manage single system – Aggregates and exposes IaaS services for secure container and modern app runtimes via IaaS APIs – Simplifies deployment and life cycle management of compute, networking, security, storage and operations functions – Complete life-cycle management of advanced developer services (Kubernetes and Harbor)
- Photon OS – A lightweight operating system optimized for containers
- ESXi – Industry-leading hypervisor running on bare metal for virtualization
- Networking – Networking virtualization based on NSX technology
- Storage – Hyper-converged storage based on vSAN technology
Photon Platform Components
Photon Platform | Technical Specifications
- Modern developer services
- Docker and Kubernetes support
- Versioned REST API-based access to platform features
- CLI and web interface enable easy access to features
- Photon Platform works seamlessly with leading PaaS framework Pivotal Cloud Foundry
- Kubernetes as a Service
- Developers get access to on-demand Kubernetes clusters. These clusters are provisioned in seconds to minutes
- Developers can scale up their Kubernetes clusters on demand, with no down time
- Easy lifecycle management of cluster, including upgrading master, etcd and worker nodes
- New versioning of Kubernetes allowing for easy upgrade of all Kubernetes infrastructure components
- Support for Persistent Volumes
- Load balanced and redundant Kubernetes multi-master deployment
- Authentication of Kubernetes API requests via integration with Lightwave (utilizing standards-based OIDC)
- Highly available Kubernetes deployments, automatically recovering from failures without any user intervention
- Low maintenance. Enables developers to focus on applications rather than spending time on automating or maintaining their clusters.
- Infrastructure as a Service
- Developers are offered a library of IaaS resources they can self-service including VMs, networks, storage
- Support for robust virtual networking via custom subnets
- Robust resource management via quotas
- Advanced image sharing functionality via IAM features
- VMs are provisioned quickly, chosen from IT defined catalog of VM sizes and operating system base images
- Scale-out control plane allows simultaneous provisioning of large numbers of workloads, supporting the needs of high churn container environments
- Integration with Active Directory via Photon’s authentication subsystem
- Simple to setup and operate infrastructure platform
- REST API, CLI and web interfaces are intuitive and easy to use
- Pre-integrated stack requires little or no customization to work in your environment
- Production-grade Security
- Isolated workloads via ESXi virtualization
- Multi-tenancy across the stack
- Identity and access management integrates with your corporate directory
- Create tenants and projects to isolate groups of users and their workloads from each other
- Certificate management and rotation across all hosts in cluster
- Storage management
- Aggregate disks in Photon Platform compute hosts into hyper-converged datastores
- Connect to traditional SAN, NFS and FC storage
- Define catalog of disk options using any ESXi supported datastore, including hyper-converged storage
- Network Virtualization for Containers
