Sustainable Secrets Management with OpenBao - Open Source@Siemens 2026

Slides and content from Michael's talk at Open Source @ Siemens 2026, diving into OpenBao's origins and why it is the sustainable choice.

For a video, see Siemens' official YouTube channel.

Welcome everyone to my talk on OpenBao and sustainable secrets management! I'm Michael "Hofi" Hofer, CTO at Adfinis and Chair of the OpenBao Technical Steering Committee (TSC).

It's fantastic to be back here in Zug for Open Source @ Siemens - for me personally, this event is always an annual highlight. Huge thanks to the Siemens crew for organizing such a great event! Every year it gets better, and this time we even have romantic ambient lighting to go with it. I'm already looking forward to next year.

Also, a quick shout-out to Jan and Pasquale for the overview on CIP earlier. It's really cool to see a neighboring Linux Foundation project in action.

Today I want to share how we can ensure secrets management remains open, community-driven, and sustainable for decades to come.

What is Secrets Management?

Before we jump into OpenBao itself, let's briefly step back: what do we actually mean when we talk about secrets management?

Looking around the room, I know most of you have strong technical backgrounds, so the core concept isn't new. It's the daily practice of protecting and integrating all the secrets your machine workloads need to function - API tokens, TLS certificates, credential pairs, and client secrets.

Notice I said machine workloads. We don't focus on human passwords here; those belong in a proper password manager. But for machine identities, the bar is high: your secrets management solution needs to be super secure and highly available. But just as importantly, it has to be flexible and developer-friendly. Our main audience consists of engineering teams who just want a solution that works without getting in their way.

Why is Secrets Management relevant for you?

In my day-to-day conversations with community members and technicial teams, the reasons to invest in…