Photo of turtles on the VMware campus courtesy of Yvonne Wong, recruiter extraordinaire.

Most of us on the Cloud Foundry identity team have been working together for just over a year. We work with a rather interesting group that leads the larger open source community that builds Cloud Foundry.

On the identity team we’ve been working to evolve Cloud Foundry’s user authentication and authorization system into a full suite of identity services — open source and built on open standards. We’ve built some cool stuff. We are now starting to publicize what we’ve built and more actively engage with the community. Our team consists of veteran SpringSource  leaders David Syer (@david_syer) and Luke Taylor in the UK, with Joel D’sa, Vidya Valmikinathan and me in Palo Alto.

Dave started us off with 3 solid blog posts for the cloudfoundry.org blog explaining our use of OAuth2 here, here, and here. He is speaking at SpringOne this week about OAuth2 as well.

Also in the blog queue, Luke has a post that discusses our password management strategy and I have one that discusses how we integrate OAuth2, SCIM, & OpenID Connect into Cloud Foundry itself. Joel recently gave a presentation to the VMware Cloud Foundry engineers about our User Account and Authentication (UAA) service.

Joel, Vidya and I will be attending IIW next week. I suspect that Joel will propose a session there to discuss Cloud Foundry identity services, what we’ve built, and what we’ve learned from operational experience. We’ll be there to work with the identity community as we plan our next steps.

I’ll link to the blog posts and presentations here when they are published.

It’s great fun to finally be able to have this system in a position we can make some noise about it, and we all are. It’s turtles all the way down.