Why We Are Throwing Our Weight Behind OpenBao

ControlPlane’s DNA co-evolved with the open source ecosystem. We are staunch advocates for the freedom to use, modify, and distribute software: a practical necessity for modern enterprises and nations striving for true digital sovereignty. Organizations need the assurance that their foundational security tooling is transparent, extensible, and free from restrictive vendor lock-in.

That is why we are immensely proud to announce our dedicated support and Enterprise offering for OpenBao, the open source fork of HashiCorp Vault.

Our decision to invest heavily in OpenBao is driven by three core pillars: unwavering belief in open source principles, a response to overwhelming market demand, and a commitment to sustaining the core maintainers who build our industry’s most critical tools.

The Demand for a Clear Migration Path

As long-term Vault implementers, we have been inundated with requests from clients asking us about OpenBao. The shift in Vault’s licensing model and complex pricing model left many organizations in a precarious position. From agile startups to Tier 1 multinational banks, clients wanted to maintain their open source posture and digital sovereignty, but lacked a clear, supported path to migrate to and operationalize OpenBao at the same levels of trust and compliance as our Vault implementations.

There was clear market whitespace: demand for a truly open source secrets management solution, but absent enterprise-grade support from credible suppliers to back it up.

Sustaining the Guardians of Open Source

Perhaps the most important reason we are supporting OpenBao is our belief in how open source should be funded. The tech industry relies heavily on critical security products built by passionate developers. Too often these maintainers burn out trying to juggle their open source contributions with a day job, or they are forced into restrictive licensing models to monetize their hard work.

We want to change that paradigm. ControlPlane is committed to supporting the open source developers of these critical security products by providing them with a solid, reliable income. We want to empower them to focus full-time on their passion projects without the looming stress of financial instability or corporate pressure to close-source their work. We commercialise these offering to bring stability to the projects, and enterprise-level assurance and SLAs to our clients.

We continue this commitment by welcoming Alex Scheel to ControlPlane! Alex is an OpenBao core maintainer, its top contributor, and ex-TOC chair. By bringing Alex into the ControlPlane family we are directly investing in the sustained development and innovation of OpenBao itself, ensuring that his invaluable expertise continues to benefit the entire community.

When maintainers are supported, open source software thrives. It becomes more secure, more feature-rich, and more reliable for everyone who depends on it.

The Blueprint: Our Work with Flux CD

If this model sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly what we did with Flux.

When Weaveworks sadly closed its doors, the future of Flux CD, a cornerstone, graduated CNCF GitOps project, seemed momentarily uncertain. ControlPlane immediately stepped in, hiring core maintainers like Stefan Prodan, and providing them with a stable home and a reliable income. We ensured that Flux both survived and accelerated, and our speakers and customers spoke at the first FluxCon in KubeCon Atlanta 2025. Morgan Stanley, MicroSoft, and RBC, amongst other, took the stage to share war stories and operational victories.

We built ControlPlane Enterprise for Flux CD, offering the enterprise support organizations needed while simultaneously funding the ongoing, open source development of the project. We are the only company to pay core maintainers to work upstream on CNCF Flux. This symbiotic relationship proved that one can build a sustainable business model that fiercely protects and promotes open source software.

We are now applying this exact same blueprint to OpenBao.

Raising the Bar with OpenSSF

Our commitment to OpenBao goes beyond code contributions and enterprise support. We are actively working to elevate the project’s security posture and feature set through the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) ecosystem.

OpenBao’s governance under the Linux Foundation provides a neutral, vendor-independent home for the project, ensuring its long-term sustainability beyond a single vendor. Building on this foundation, we are driving adoption of OpenSSF best practices across the industry, including expanding OpenBao’s existing use of OpenSSF projects including SLSA, Sigstore, and OpenSSF supply chain tooling.

There security features represent the kind of rigorous, transparent security engineering that ControlPlane’s enterprise users rightly demand, and that only truly open source projects can deliver.

What’s Next

We believe that true security requires transparency, and true transparency requires open source. By supporting OpenBao and its community, we are ensuring that the future of secrets management remains open, secure, and in the hands of the people who build and use it.

For more information visit ControlPlane Enterprise for OpenBao