Last week I was fortunate enough to be part of a blogger early access program covering VMware’s  announcement around two new open source projects built to enable enterprise adoption of cloud-native applications

 

– Project Lightwave, an identity and access management project that will extend enterprise-scale and security to cloud-native applications

– Project Photon, a lightweight Linux operating system optimized for cloud-native applications.

 

Below is more information about the two projects and the awesome abilities they are opening to VMware customers and the ability for cloud native applications:

 

Project Lightwave will be the industry’s first container identity and access management technology that extends enterprise-ready security capabilities to cloud-native applications. The distributed nature of these applications, which can feature complex networks of microservices and hundreds or thousands instances of applications, will require enterprises to maintain the identity and access of all interrelated components and users. Project Lightwave will add a new layer of container security beyond container isolation by enabling companies to enforce access control and identity management capabilities across the entire infrastructure and application stack, including all stages of the application development lifecycle. In addition, the technology will enable enterprises to manage access control so that only authorized users will be capable of running authorized containers on authorized hosts through integration with a container host runtime such as Project Photon. Features and capabilities will include:

• Centralized Identity Management – Project Lightwave will deliver single sign-on, authentication, and authorization using name and passwords, tokens and certificates to provide enterprises with a single solution for securing cloud-native applications.
• Multi-tenancy – Project Lightwave’s multi-tenancy support will enable an enterprise’s infrastructure to be used by a variety of applications and teams.
• Open Standards Support – Project Lightwave will incorporate multiple open standards such as Kerberos, LDAP v3, SAML, X.509 and WS-Trust, and is designed to interoperate with other standards-based technologies in the data center.
• Enterprise-ready scalability – Project Lightwave is being built with a simple, extensible multi-master replication model allowing horizontal scalability while delivering high performance.
• Certificate authority and key management – Project Lightwave will simplify certificate-based operations and key management across the infrastructure.

 

Project Photon, a natural complement to Project Lightwave, is a lightweight Linux operating system for containerized applications. Optimized for VMware vSphere® and VMware vCloud® Air™ environments, Project Photon will enable enterprises to run both containers and virtual machines natively on a single platform, and deliver container isolation when containers run within virtual machines. Future enhancements to this project will enable seamless portability of containerized applications from a developer’s desktop to dev/test environments. Features and capabilities include:

• Broad Container Solutions Support – Project Photon supports Docker, rkt and Garden (Pivotal) container solutions enabling customers to choose the container solution that best suits their needs.
• Container Security – Project Photon offers containerized applications increased security and isolation in conjunction with virtual machines as well as authentication and authorization through integration with Project Lightwave enabling customers to further secure their applications to the container layer.
• Flexible Versioning and Extensibility – An industry-first, Project Photon provides administrators and enterprise developers with extensibility and flexibility over how to best update their container host runtime by supporting both rpm for image-based system versioning, and a yum-compatible, package-based lifecycle management system, allowing for fine-grained package management.

Today, Pivotal also announced Lattice which packages open source components from Cloud Foundry for deploying, managing and running containerized workloads on a scalable cluster. Together, VMware and Pivotal will provide end-to-end cloud-native solutions from infrastructure to applications. VMware’s resilient infrastructure for cloud-native applications complements Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry application platform solutions.

To encourage broad feedback and testing from customers, partners, prospects, and the community at large, Project Photon and Project Lightwave will be released as open source projects. By open sourcing the software, developers will be able to contribute directly to the projects to help drive increased product interoperability and new features. Project Photon is available for download today through GitHub. Project Photon has been packaged as a Vagrant box so users can easily test its capabilities on any platform. The Photon Vagrant box is available for download through HashiCorp’s Atlas here. Project Lightwave is expected be made available for download later in 2015.

 

I’m really looking forward to learning more about these projects and trying them out once they are released. With the popularity of docker it’s no wonder VMware decided they needed to start integrating with the technologies.

 

Gregg