Yahoo Inc. is probably one of the least heralded open-source contributors around, throwing its weight behind an array of community software projects over the last decade, with its most notable contribution being the Apache Hadoop big data platform.

On Tuesday the company open-sourced yet another potentially significant project called Athenz that should prove especially useful to anyone using software containers to develop applications that can run across operating systems. The new platform is described as a “role-based access-control solution” that enables trusted relationships between applications and services requiring authorized access.

In a blog post on Tumblr, Yahoo explained that Athenz does this by authorizing the dynamic creation of containerized workloads and compute instances, and by securing builds and the deployment of artifacts to the Docker Registry. It also manages data access from centralized key management systems to authorized applications and services.

Yahoo said Athenz provides both a centralized and decentralized authorization model for network administrators who need to grant access to resources managed by their applications or services. It works with both containers and virtual machines, independently or on bare-metal servers.

Athenz also supports the migration of workloads from one node to another and authorizes compute resources to connect with other services in just minutes. It replaces older network access control lists and Internet protocol solutions that take far longer to propagate across a network.

Yahoo said that before it built Athenz, it relied on multiple solutions to manage permissions and access controls across its services. Doing so was painstaking at best, so the company created Athenz as an all-encompassing authorization solution that can satisfy the performance requirements for all of its services and products. Yahoo says it built Athenz from scratch, fully intending to release it to the open-source community as soon as it was viable.

The company has also created a set of application programming interfaces in the Resource Description Language for users to manage Athenz. It also comes with Go and Java client libraries that enable applications to be easily integrated with Athenz. Using the solution, network administrators can easily dictate what roles are allowed or denied to applications and services from a centralized management system.

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