News today from VMware of a couple of new open source projects that they're hoping will give it the opportunity to be an important player in the move to a new type of enterprise application. By way of background, it is worth spending some time explaining the way today's applications are fundamentally different from those previously.
Traditional enterprise IT was typified by monolithic applications. Organizations generally made use of a single vendor for much of their application development - this is where the term "We're a
These projects being announced today by VMare aim to help these challenges while at the same time keeping
Project Lightwave is VMware's container identity and access management technology. The distributed nature of microservices-based applications makes it difficult for enterprises to maintain the identity and access of all interrelated components and users. Project Lightwave is aimed at adding 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. According to VMware, Lightwave capabilities, when it is available later this year, will include:
- Centralized Identity Management – Project Lightwave will deliver single sign-on, authentication, and authorization using name and passwords, tokens and certificates
- Multi-tenancy
- 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
- Certificate authority and key management
Project Photon is VMware's attempt at a lightweight Linux operating system for containerized applications. It completes with
- Broad Container Solutions Support – Project Photon supports Docker, rkt and Garden (Pivotal) container solutions
- 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
- Flexible Versioning and Extensibility
Alongside these two VMware announcements, Pivotal (which is owned, in part, by VMware) announced Lattice, an initiative which packages open source components from Cloud Foundry for deploying and managing running containerized workloads on a scalable cluster
As is often the case, it is interesting to look at the partner quotes in the press release for a feel of the politics behind the annoucnements. Most noticeable was the exclusion of Docker, but the inclusion of its competitor CoreOS in the release. Have no doubt, VMware is concerned about the momentum that Docker has and what that means for its core business. By pushing CoreOS in the release, VMware gets to both support a Docker competitor but also create some uncertaintly in the market. Dockers recent funding and rumored $1 billion valuation means that VMware needs to strongly push other players - a range of container providers doesn't undermind VMware's business nearly as much as a totally-dominant Docker does.
Two interesting projects from VMware that, once again, show just how important containers and microservices will be going forwards. There's a lot at stake here - VMware is all-too aware of that fact.
