OpenBao
Trial
OpenBao is the open source fork of HashiCorp Vault, created after HashiCorp moved Vault to the Business Source License, just as OpenTofu was forked from Terraform. It is a Linux Foundation project licensed under MPL 2.0.
We run it in production in one of our projects as the central secrets store for applications on Kubernetes. The External Secrets Operator syncs secrets from OpenBao into the cluster, so no secret lives in Git or in deployment manifests, and secrets can be rotated in one place.
Considerations
- Critical infrastructure: Everything depends on the secrets store being available and its unseal keys being safe. Plan high availability, backups and the unseal procedure before going to production.