17 posts tagged with "community"

Slides and content from Alex's Open Source Summit NA 2026 talk, describing the horizontal scalability features of OpenBao.

For a video, see the Linux Foundation's official YouTube channel.

Welcome everyone to my talk on OpenBao and how we added horizontal scalability to the project. I'm Alex Scheel, Head of OpenBao Development at ControlPlane, a long time member of the OpenBao TSC, and chair of the OpenBao Development Working Group.

I've been fortunate to have a hand in the development of OpenBao since nearly the beginning of the project, and before that, at HashiCorp's Vault CryptoSec team.

If, like me, you were wishing you could get out for a post-lunch walk, thank you for staying, but we'll have to settle for some photos of Minneapolis I've sprinkled through the presentation. And thank you all for visiting Minnesota, whether from near or far!

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.

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.

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.

As the OpenBao community starts development on Namespaces and the Horizontal Scalability Working Group has its kickoff, I wanted to take the opportunity to put forward a blog post describing how these two groups' work can compliment each other and provide an alternative path forward other than Vault Enterprise's Performance Secondary and Disaster Recovery clustering modes.

Slides and content from Alex's FOSDEM '25 talk about OpenBao's usage at GitLab.

For a video, see our official YouTube channel or on the FOSDEM video mirror.

Hello everyone! I'm Alex Scheel, a Staff Backend Engineer at GitLab and Chair of the OpenBao Technical Steering Committee. I'm here to talk about OpenBao and its usage at GitLab.