VMWare Sends Project Lightwave & Photon to Open Source
VMWare’s newest announcement concerns two popular projects that have been released as open source. These projects are called Project Lightwave and Project Photon.
Project Lightwave is an enterprise identity management suite for the cloud. This user access manager application will help keep public, private and hybrid cloud safe from unauthorized users. Project Lightwave offers sophisticated access management capabilities that administrators can completely customize. VMWare says that Lightwave will consolidate all of the popular login methods such as SASL, OAuth, SAML, LDAP v3, Kerberos, X.509, and WS-Trust.
The VMWare Blog described Lightwave as “An open source project comprised of standards-based, enterprise-grade, identity and access management services targeting critical security, governance, and compliance challenges for cloud-native apps.” VMWare’s blog post goes on to say, “The project’s code is tested and production-ready having been used in VMware’s solutions to secure distributed environments at scale.”
VMWare’s introduction of Lightwave was paired with the announcement concerning Project Photon. Project Photo is an OS that allows organizations rapidly build and deploy cloud apps within an optimized, lightweight Linux operating system. The idea is to take the Lightwave authentication infrastructure and use it provide access to rapidly deployed cloud based apps within your hybrid cloud infrastructure.
VMWare mentioned that they open sourced these projects in efforts to encourage innovation within the community. When organizations have full control over the way they login and out of applications, sophisticated applications can be rapidly delivered to end users without having to issue individual credentials. This single sign-on approach allows organizations to think outside the box when deploying applications.
Project Lightwave and Project Photon are frameworks, but not in the development sense. These frameworks allow organizations to completely customize their end users login experience using the cloud, yet having the flexibility and security afforded to an organization by VMWare, Lightwave and the open source community.
