VMware is open sourcing cloud tools

VMware has open sourced two sets of tools the company said would accelerate cloud adoption in the enterprise and improve their security posture.

The company announced Project Lightwave, which the company is pitching as the industry’s first container identity and access management tool for cloud-native applications, and Project Photon, a lightweight Linux operating system optimised for running these kinds of apps in vSphere and vCloud Air.

The move follows Pivotal’s recent launch of Lattic, a container cluster scheduler for Cloud Foundry that the software firm is pitching as a more modular way of building apps exposing CF components as standalone microservices (thus making apps built with Lattice easier to scale).

“Through these projects VMware will deliver on its promise of support for any application in the enterprise – including cloud-native applications – by extending our unified platform with Project Lightwave and Project Photon,” said Kit Colbert, vice president and chief technology officer for Cloud-Native Applications, VMware.

“Used together, these new open source projects will provide enterprises with the best of both worlds. Developers benefit from the portability and speed of containerized applications, while IT operations teams can maintain the security and performance required in today’s business environment,” Colbert said.

Earlier this year VMware went on the container offensive, announcing an updated vSphere platform that would enable users to run Linux containers side by side with traditional VMs as well as its own distribution of OpenStack.

The latest announcement – particularly Lattice – is part of a broader industry trend that sees big virtualisation incumbents embrace a more modular, cloud-friendly architecture (which many view as synonymous with containers) in their offerings. This week one of VMware’s chief rivals in this area, Microsoft, announced its own container-like architecture for Azure following a series of moves to improve support for Docker on its on-premise and cloud platforms.