We are thrilled to announce the availability of OpenBao v2.7, adding PostgreSQL horizontal scalability, External HSM and KMS-Backed Keys support, and Post-Quantum Cryptography!
Despite a shorter turnaround than from v2.5.x to v2.6.x, we were excited to see many substantial features and several major security patches land within this release. Many thanks to all the contributors and security reporters!
We are thrilled to announce the availability of OpenBao v2.6, adding per-namespace sealing and the new workflow engine for cross-plugin communication!
Our most collaborative release to date, v2.6 features contributions from 42 first-time contributors, 27 individuals contributing multiple changes, and 8 users with double-digit change counts. Simply fantastic work and a big thanks to the community that makes this happen!
OpenBao v2.6.x has been out for a month now and v2.7.x will soon follow, stay tuned for more releases!
In this blog post, I will give you an overview of the new Horizontal Scalability feature of OpenBao, its (current) limitations and planned future developments. In the second part, I will show some benchmarks to see in which cases the new feature helps (spoiler: it works best in read-heavy workloads, but doesn't improve write-heavy workloads).
The OpenBao community had a great time at Open Source Summit Europe 2025! The event once again showed how strong the demand for secure and reliable secret management in enterprise environments has become.
One theme was clear: Companies and individuals demand tools to manage secrets across their systems, and solutions like OpenBao are foundational for security and compliance.
Open source builders, security engineers, and platform teams are converging on Amsterdam and OpenBao will be in the middle of it, thanks to the generosity of the Linux Foundation.
We’re excited to announce our first official booth at Open Source Summit Europe 2025. If you care about secure automation, multi‑tenant architectures, or meeting the stewards of your critical infrastructure tooling, come talk with us!
Official event site: Open Source Summit Europe
Find Us
Event: Open Source Summit Europe 2025
Dates: 25–27 August 2025
Location: RAI Amsterdam, Netherlands
Booth: G/S7
Hashtag: #OSSummit #OpenBao
This isn’t just a swag stop (expect some stickers); it’s a place to trade real-world stories, get practical guidance, and influence the OpenBao roadmap, now ready for its second iteration!
We’re excited to welcome OpenBao to the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) as a newly accepted sandbox project!
OpenBao is an open source identity-based secrets and encryption management system that helps organizations securely store, manage, and audit access to sensitive data like API keys, passwords, and certificates. Originally developed under LF Edge and forked from HashiCorp Vault, OpenBao has now found its new home in the OpenSSF, where it aligns more directly with the needs of security professionals and open source maintainers.
“Joining OpenSSF has been a dream come true,” said Alex Scheel, Chair of the OpenBao Technical Steering Committee. “This wouldn’t be possible without the support of OpenSSF’s Technical Advisory Council—many thanks for their help and consideration!”
We are excited to introduce Namespaces to the OpenBao Secret Manager – a powerful feature designed to bring robust multi-tenancy and fine-grained isolation to your secrets management workflows.
Namespaces in OpenBao are logical partitions within a single OpenBao instance, functioning as isolated environments where teams, organizations, or applications can operate independently.
Each namespace acts like a mini-OpenBao, with its own policies, authentication methods, secret engines, tokens, and identity groups. This architecture enables organizations to implement a true OpenBao-as-a-Service model, empowering internal customers to self-manage their environments securely and efficiently.
Great news for the OpenBao community! In a major step towards enhancing its own security and openness, EdgeX Foundry has officially adopted OpenBao as its default secret store for the EdgeX 4.0 release.
For those unfamiliar, EdgeX Foundry is an open-source, IoT/edge computing framework hosted by the Linux Foundation. It’s designed to enable seamless communication between devices, applications and services using a flexible, microservices-based architecture. Whether you’re working in automation, energy, or building management, EdgeX helps bring everything together in a standardized way.
We are thrilled to announce the availability of OpenBao v2.1.0, focused on safety and scalability improvements!
This release spent some time laying the groundwork for safety and scalability improvements for releases to come. With the help of the community, OpenBao will now take advantage of transactional storage semantics from its underlying data store, giving operators and plugin developers confidence in the consistency of storage writes. This storage safety allows us to focus on alternative storage layouts for improving scalability, for instance, increasing the maximum number of mount table entries past the single-entry limit.
This release also features contributions from many new and repeat contributors; thank you all!
We are thrilled to announce the availability of OpenBao v2.0.0, its initial GA release!
It was fabulous to see contributors and member companies from a wide range of backgrounds come together to support OpenBao over the past several months and build an initial GA release in the open. This release focuses mostly on stabilizing the fork, reducing the binary size, and giving the community room to make the decisions it needs to ensure a healthy start to the ecosystem.