6 posts tagged with "collaboration"

As the summer of 2025 closed, OpenBao's Dev WG and TSC put together and approved a new technical direction and roadmap for 2025-2026. But before we get into the details, I think is important to look back at and celebrate what all we've accomplished this year:

1. Many technical initiatives have landed, from namespaces to transactional storage, to CEL support, and many smaller things in between.

2. Many continuing working groups and large technical initiates have been started, from the horizontal scalability WG, focused on read scalability; the UI WG, focused on a rewrite of our EmberJS Web UI into React; to the PKCS#11/KMS WG, focused on including external keys into OpenBao. Thank you to everyone who participates in these!

3. Many, many contributions from many, many contributors! We welcomed:

   • 741 commits to main,
   • 287 contributors in the past year,
   • 10 new committers, and
   • 4 new moderators!

   And like I say nearly every meeting, a special thanks to all net-new contributors! A fresh set of eyes brings wonders to a storied project, and often revisiting earlier design choices let us improve the experience.

And yes, not everything on the 2024-2025 roadmap was completed. Don't worry, you can still contribute items from it if you want! But for a community just starting out, with its first formal direction proposal, I think the response we got exceeded my wildest expectations.

Imagine starting a mentorship program with a big goal and... not a perfect plan. Sound familiar? That was us, three months ago. We had a brilliant mentee, Fatima Patel, a crucial feature for OpenBao’s roadmap, and a healthy dose of "let's figure this out as we go."

Spoiler alert: it worked. Spectacularly. But not because we had all the answers on day one. It worked because we treated the mentorship itself like an open-source project: we iterated, adapted, and optimized for success in real-time.

This is the story of how we structured—and restructured—a 12-week program that ended up giving OpenBao a scalability boost and fantastic contributions.

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.

What Are Namespaces?​

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.

What is EdgeX Foundry?​

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.

I'm pleased to announce that our first direction and roadmap document has been approved by the TSC!

This represents a major commitment to openness for this project. Historically, upstream hasn't published an open roadmap or collaborated with the community on a shared vision and direction for their project.