Open Source

Enterprise GitHub projects of the week: Confidant, UI for UWP, & Ansible

Open Source is everywhere, and quickly becoming the new norm for how companies approach software development. We take at a look at some of the Open Source projects on GitHub that can help make life easier for IT teams in organisations.



Confidant by Lyft


Find it at:

What it does: Confidant is a secret management system that aims to feel as if it's a native extension of supported cloud providers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently supported, with planned support for Google Cloud in the future. Confidant extends AWS's identity and access management service (IAM) and key management service (KMS) for authentication, authorisation and data encryption at rest. It can be used to store secrets for your services, such as API credentials, SSL certificates, SSH keys, and more. The secrets are mapped to "services" via IAM policy, which allows fine-grained access of the secrets, inside or outside of AWS.

Why is it useful: Confidant makes secret management approachable to end-users, while also making it possible to quickly correct mistakes, and audit changes. Every change is a revision, and the full history of services and secrets are saved, which makes it easy to recover from a botched credential rotation, or to know when a secret has been changed to correlate it with an ongoing incident. Everything is manageable through a web interface, or an API.

Confidant has a flexible authentication and authorization system that acts as an extension of AWS's IAM. In Confidant, the basic unit of access control for secrets is a service. Secrets can be mapped to multiple services, and access to the service is granted through IAM policy. This makes it possible to manage access to services through policy in IAM users, roles, groups, managed policies, and other IAM concepts. With this you can allow access to secrets from anywhere you can use IAM credentials. For instance, combined with a service like metadataproxy, you can scope secrets to individual containers, even on developer laptops. The authentication used works across multiple regions and accounts, and can even be used to share secrets to services in external third parties.


UI for UWP by Progress Telerik


Find it at:

What it does: Progress Telerik’s UI for UWP contains over 20 UI controls for developers building Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications.

The suite contains controls that address common UI requirements in line-of-business (LOB) applications, including data management, scheduling, navigation, and data visualisation.

Why is it useful: UI for UWP provides a wide range of controls to reach all Windows 10 devices. It saves developers time by providing a rich set of application building blocks that can be used quickly and easily in UWP applications. The controls provided are built by developers for developers; you can get started immediately with detailed documentation and code examples to understand how they work.


Ansible by Red Hat


Find it at:

What it does: Ansible is a simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy.


Why is it useful: Ansible handles configuration-management, application deployment, cloud provisioning, ad-hoc task-execution, and multinode orchestration - including trivialising things like zero downtime rolling updates with load balancers.


« A peek into the stealing habits of cybercriminals


Initial Coin Offering: Why the IPO of cryptocurrencies is suddenly popular »
Dan Swinhoe


  • twt
  • twt
  • twt
  • Mail


Do you think your smartphone is making you a workaholic?