VMware announced Monday two new open source initiatives to help in the adoption of cloud-native applications, namely Project Lightwave and Project Photon.
While Lightwave aims to improve the security of cloud-native applications through identity and access management, Photon provides a “lightweight” Linux operating system optimized for those applications.
“Whether it’s Google or Netflix, they’re open sourcing a lot of the work they’ve done to allow businesses to go and drive [adoption],” said Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO of cloud-native apps at VMware.
During a live webcast, the company brought on partners including Pivotal, Mesosphere and CoreOS. These companies were among partners that VMware will work with to develop open standards to allow for interoperability and security in the cloud.
The goal, according to the company, is to help developers build, deploy and manage modern distributed applications that are scalable, lightweight and containerized.
VMware is calling Project Lightwave the industry’s “first container identity and access management technology that extends enterprise-ready security capabilities to cloud-native applications.”
Its functionality will help enterprises manage identity across complex networks of microservices, thousands of applications with the ability to enforce access control across an entire infrastructure and application stacks, including throughout app development.
It will feature centralized identity management, multi-tenancy, open standards support, enterprise-ready scalability and certificate authority and key management.
Project Photon, on the other hand, is designed as a Linux operating system for containerized apps – one that is optimized for vSphere and vCloud Air. It will allow companies to run “both containers and virtual machines natively on a single platform, and deliver container isolation when containers run within virtual machines,” the company said.
According to VMware, both solutions would integrate with the One Cloud, VMware’s platform that unifies management and visibility across on-premise, public and hybrid clouds. Project Photon is now available for download through GitHub.
“These open source pieces are so important because it’s really about not reinventing the wheel,” said Colbert. “It’s about leveraging what these other technology giants have done, the kinds of mistakes they’ve made and solutions they’ve found and make your business faster.”
