VMware yesterday announced to new projects, Project Photon and Project Lightwave. Project Photon is a Linux Operating System which is optimized to run on vSphere and capable of running what VMware calls Cloud-Native Apps. The footprint will be approximately 300 MB, support for container formats like Docker, rkt and Warden (developed by Pivotal).
Cloud-Native Apps as defined by VMware are applications which are developed and operated using techniques like DevOps, architected using micro-services and 12-factor apps and deployed using containers.
To enforce security and governance on these container workloads, Project Lightwave was started. Lightwave will allow for enforcement of security and governance by ensuring only authorized containers are run on authorized hosts by authorized users. Lightwave will allow for Multi-tenance, provide support for SASL, OAuth, SAML, LDAP v3, Kerberos, X.509, and WS-Trust and will provide extensible authentication and authorization using username and password, tokens and PKI infrastructure for users, computers, containers and user defined objects.
Both projects will be open source (available on GitHub) so that customers, partners, prospects and the developer community can participate.