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Thursday October 19, 2006

Federation Manager - A Bootcamp to die for...

If you work for Sun or you’re a Sun partner, here’s something really cool available to you...

Last week I had the chance to attend a new bootcamp Sun Learning has just released: the Federation Bootcamp . It’s everything one will ever needs to know about identity federation and Sun’s Federation Manager (FM). And believe me, there is a LOT to cover. Here’s the list of the modules covered in this bootcamp:

Identity Federation Concepts

Standards & Specifications

Federation Product Intro

Implementation Federation Frameworks

Liberty ID-WSF

Programming & Customization

Security

Privacy

LDAP back end for FM

High Availability (i.e. load balancing etc.)

All these modules have 2 components: a lecture that will teach you the fundamentals and prepare you for the second part: the lab. The labs were really what I was looking for since I’m well aware of the theory part (I guess participating to all the Liberty Alliance meetings does help ). The labs are really hands-on, lots of installation, configuration and messing up with FM. Here are some examples of what you learn to do:

Deploying FM - setting up security

Adding & configuring the SAML2 plugin

Deploying LDAP with FM

Setting up load balancing etc.

So again if you’re at Sun or if you’re a Sun employee and you’re interested in federated identity you have to take this bootcamp (drop me an email and I’ll forward the contact people).

In the next blog entries I will describe in more details some of the key points this Federation Bootcamp touched upon.

Stay tuned!

Posted at 04:00PM Oct 19, 2006 by Hubert Le Van Gong in Identity | Comments[5]

Comments:

In a future blog entry I would love for you to answer two questions: 1. SAML is being built into J2EE containers, so why would someone need a separate product 2. SAML also supports XACML. What would it take for Sun to start talking about this aspect

Posted by James on October 23, 2006 at 03:01 AM PDT #

James - (1) not every app is deployed in a J2EE container. If your J2EE container does support SAML, then great. Have at it. (2) Watch this space : https://opensso.dev.java.net/

Posted by Pat on October 25, 2006 at 07:44 PM PDT #

I can understand the value in steps 1-5, but why do you need to know the rest? This seems like it should be a 1/2 day course. Why do you need steps 6-11? Doesn't Federation Manager just take care of these things for you? Seems like it should be automated.

Posted by Ryan Hunter on November 08, 2006 at 07:19 AM PST #

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for your comment.
This bootcamp (especially the modules 6-11) really goes deep into teaching you the nitty gritty details of Federation Manager (FM) and all the various ways you can configure it (tough yes a good part of it can be automated).
For instance module 6 teaches you how to create metadata and establish a circle of trust (COT) between the SP and the IdP. It also shows how account or attribute mapping are achieved using out-of-the-box functions. Finally you'll learn how to integrate SAML2 into your web application.

That's a lot to cover and for having gone through it there's no way it could be done in 1/2 day!

Cheers,
Hubert

Posted by Hubert on November 08, 2006 at 11:26 AM PST #

Ryan - I think the key thing here is that this is boot camp, not basic training. See the more detailed course description that Hubert has posted here.

Posted by Pat Patterson on November 08, 2006 at 02:28 PM PST #

C'est la vie !