Containers are all the rage, and with good reason. As discussed previously, containers allow you to quickly and easily deploy new services and applications onto your network, without requiring too much in the way of added system resources. Containers are more cost-effective than using dedicated hardware or virtual machines, and they’re easier to update and reuse.
Best of all, containers love Linux (and vice versa). Without much trouble or time, you can get a Linux server up and running with Docker and deploying containers. But, which Linux distribution is best suited for the deployment of your containers? There are a lot of options. You could go with a standard Ubuntu Server platform (which makes installing Docker and deploying containers incredibly easy), or you could opt for a lighter weight distribution — one geared specifically for the purpose of deploying containers.
One such distribution is Photon. This particular platform was created in 2005 by VMware; it includes the Docker daemon and works with container frameworks, such as Mesos and Kubernetes. Photon is optimized to work with VMware vSphere, but it can be used on bare metal, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or VirtualBox.