VMware Cloud Native App Projects – courtesy of vBrownBag

Earlier last month, I was invited onto the #vBrownBag podcast to give an overview of my experiences with the various ongoing VMware Cloud Native App (CNA) projects. I had a great chat with Gregg Robertson, and demonstrated a number of things that we are working on. I noticed this morning that the recording is now live, so if you are interested in some of the things we are doing in the CNA space, I’d recommend taking a look. I’ve embedded the video here:

Upcoming #vBrownBag EMEA Appearance – July 26th at 7pm BST

As my take-3 tenure in the VMware Cloud Native Apps (CNA) team draws to a close, the guys over at #vBrownBag have kindly invited me to come on their show and talk about the various VMware project and initiatives that I have been lucky enough to be involved with. All going well, I hope to be able to demonstrate the Docker Volume Driver for vSphere, some overview of Photon Controller CLI and Photon Platform with Docker Swarm, and maybe Kubernetes as well as some vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). If you are interested, you can register here. I’d be delighted if…

Getting Started with vSphere Integrated Containers v0.4.0

I’ve been working very closely with our vSphere Integrated Container (VIC) team here at VMware recently, and am delighted to say that v0.4.0 is now available for download from GitHub. Of course, this is still not supported in production, and is still in tech preview. However for those of you interested, it gives you an opportunity to try it out and see the significant progress made by the team over the last couple of months. You can download it from bintray. This version of VIC is bringing us closer and closer to the original functionality of “Project Bonneville” for running…

Deploy Docker Swarm using docker-machine with Consul on Photon Controller

In this post I will now show you the steps involved in creating a Docker Swarm configuration using docker-machine with Photon Controller driver plugin. In previous posts, I showed how you can setup Photon OS to deploy Photon Controller and I also showed you how to build docker-machine for Photon Controller. Note that there are a lot of ways to deploy Swarm. Since I was given a demonstration on doing this using “Consul” for cluster membership and discovery, that is the mechanism that I am going to use here. Now, a couple of weeks back, we looked at deploying Docker…

Compare and Contrast: Photon Controller vs VIC (vSphere Integrated Containers)

As many regular reader will be aware, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on VMware’s Cloud Native App solutions. This is due to an internal program available to VMware employees called a Take-3. A Take-3 is where employees can take 3 months out of their current role and try a new challenge in another part of the company. Once we launched VSAN 6.2 earlier this year, I thought this would be an opportune time to try something different. Thanks to the support from the management teams in both my Storage and Availability BU (SABU) and the Cloud Native…

Photon OS 1.0 Release is here

VMware has just officially announced Photon OS 1.0. This follows on from the RC (Release Candidate) announcement back in late April.  For those of you who are not familiar with Photon OS, this is a minimal Linux container host (in the form of a Virtual Machine), optimized to run on VMware products such as ESXi. It can run containers which adhere to  Docker, rkt, and the Pivotal Garden container specifications.

Deploying Kubernetes using kube-up/down on Photon Controller

In some earlier post, I provided instructions on how one could deploy Kubernetes (K8S) on Photon Controller using the built-in photon controller CLI. In this next post, I want to show you how Kubernetes can be deployed natively, using kube-up and kube-down, on Photon Controller v0.9. In this example I am using Photon OS, a minimal Linux container host, optimized to run on vSphere (and other VMware products). Now in order to deploy K8S, a number of additional tooling needs to be added to Photon OS. The requirements are highlighted in this earlier blog post. Once all the necessary components…