ControlPlane Enterprise for OpenBao - Meet the Team

Meet the OpenBao team at ControlPlane

As we launch ControlPlane Enterprise for OpenBao, we’re bringing our trademark capabilities and Cloud Native expertise to the forefront of secrets management. Today, we’re pulling back the curtain to introduce the experts driving this offering forward.

Alex Scheel (@cipherboy) grew up in the self-described golden era of Open Source - IRC, mailing lists, wikis - and has been a core contributor to OpenBao and HashiCorp Vault for years. Having supported government, finance, and everything from startups to global enterprises throughout his career, he has seen the full spectrum of secrets management. He is a firm believer that software should run wherever the customer needs it. He is focused on helping OpenBao build the kind of open governance that makes corporate teams feel safe. Away from the keyboard, he’s top-notch on the violin.

John Kjell’s journey into the Open Source landscape began while leading the delivery of a product built on OSS tooling. However, it was the SolarBurst incident that sharpened his focus, having exposed an accountability gap within the delivery pipeline. That discomfort led him to CNCF TAG Security, where he worked on the Supply Chain Security Best Practices whitepaper. This path evolved into maintainer roles for in-toto and TUF, contributions to multiple other projects under the OpenSSF and ultimately to ControlPlane. He’s a strong believer in neutral foundations and is genuinely upset when projects pull the licence rug out from under the communities that depend on them. When not actively promoting the variety of Open Source initiatives he’s involved in, John can be found chasing three kids, two dogs, and two cats.

Aiman Alsari has worked with some of the largest Vault deployments in the world, giving him a front-row seat to where the bottlenecks are, where the operational headaches live, and what actually scales. Today, he’s channelling those insights to make OpenBao more resilient and the developer experience genuinely smoother. His view on secrets management is blunt: it holds the entire set of keys to your kingdom, and too many teams only find out how exposed they are after permissive policies have quietly accumulated for years. He’s excited to take things back to the OpenBao project’s roots, completely free and open source enterprise secrets management funded with a sustainable paid support model.

Mario Weigel has been in the Linux and automation world since 2002, moving through support, testing, and systems administration before the DevOps movement caught up with skills he’d already built. For several years, he’s been consulting in complex, heavily regulated sectors to design solutions that enable security and development teams to thrive in tandem. In his own time, he leads the Auckland Kubernetes meetup, rides mountain bikes less often than he’d like, and is slowly learning Spanish.

Rob Kenefeck started in cloud native with a conversation about how containerisation could solve real deployment headaches across thousands of endpoints. What keeps him here is the philosophy as much as the technology: cloud native means everyone gets the same tools, the same architectural flexibility, and access to how others are solving the same problems with no license gate required. This belief in transparent, community-driven problem-solving is exactly what drew him to OpenBao. Removing the price barrier from enterprise-grade secrets management isn’t a small feat - it levels the playing field, meaning critical security capabilities are no longer a luxury for the few and larger organizations can champion open source through meaningful support, not just licensing fees. Outside of work, Rob puts that same energy into building the cloud native community across Australia, helping make sure the ecosystem is as open in practice as it is in principle.

Eugene Davis found his way to cloud native through a winding path across development, IT security, and CI-focused DevOps roles. For him, OpenBao’s significance is straightforward: it makes secrets management accessible while being genuinely compatible with digital sovereignty - no lock-in, no vendor dependency. His honest take is that secrets management looks harder than it is, and that the intimidation factor itself is a security risk. Off the clock, he’s an avid reader with a strong preference for Weird Fiction.

Tim Bannister came to Kubernetes in 2018 looking for answers in the documentation, only to find gaps instead. He started sending pull requests and ended up as technical lead for the Kubernetes SIG Docs and as a co-editor of the official Kubernetes blog. He’s bringing that same instinct to OpenBao: lower the barrier to contributing, and more people will. He also has a practical warning for teams migrating from AWS Secrets Manager: in Kubernetes, if you can list the names of Secrets, you can usually read their contents too, which surprises more people than it should. Tim volunteers at open source events and runs live sound for local bands.

Together, the ControlPlane Enterprise for OpenBao team spans AMER, APAC and EMEA - as Alex puts it, the community never fully stops working. That global spread isn’t accidental. It means there’s always someone online, always a perspective from a different regulatory environment or deployment context, and no single timezone bottleneck on progress.

If you would like to review your secrets management or find out more about migrating to OpenBao, let us know.