Nvidia Quietly Adopted HashiCorp Vault's Open Rival

Nvidia's own engineering documentation, not any press release, is the only place the company describes exactly how it uses HashiCorp Vault's open-source rival to protect its Kubernetes secrets.

Nvidia's own documentation for Nvidia Cloud Functions describes OpenBao, the open-source fork of HashiCorp's Vault, running in a namespace called vault-system, where it "handles secret injection into NVCF service pods and stores sensitive configuration such as Cassandra credentials and registry pull secrets." Nvidia was added to OpenBao's public adopters list on May 20, 2026, and the trade publication TechTarget reported the adoption on June 18.

OpenBao exists because HashiCorp changed Vault's license to the Business Source License in August 2023, restricting how competitors could use it. Engineers who had led the Linux Foundation's Open Horizon edge-computing project, several from IBM, created OpenBao that November as a fork under the original open-source terms. The project reached what its maintainers called a production-ready 2.0 release in September 2024, and it joined the Open Source Security Foundation as a sandbox project in June 2025, gaining a separate CVE disclosure process and its own security audits.

What Nvidia's documentation actually shows

According to Nvidia's own docs, each NVCF service authenticates to OpenBao using its Kubernetes service account's JWT token, and OpenBao runs policies that control which secrets each service, among a list that includes the api, sis, ess and invocation-service components, is allowed to read. A migrations job writes Cassandra passwords and container-registry credentials into the vault at setup, and a separate auto-unseal sidecar keeps OpenBao available by automatically unsealing replicas after a restart, reading the unseal keys from a Kubernetes secret rather than requiring a person to enter them by hand.

Nvidia's documentation describes a second encryption layer sitting above that setup: when a customer stores a secret through the NVCF API, an internal secrets service encrypts it with a key specific to that customer's namespace, and that key is itself stored in Cassandra, encrypted again by a master key OpenBao holds. Decrypting the original secret means retrieving the namespace key from Cassandra, decrypting it with the master key from OpenBao, and only then decrypting the customer's data, a chain Nvidia's own docs lay out in that order.

The release that followed eleven weeks later

OpenBao shipped version 2.6 on Aug. 6, 2026, with 42 first-time contributors, 27 people who made more than one change, and 8 who made double-digit numbers of changes, according to the Open Source Security Foundation's announcement. The release added per-namespace sealing, which lets an operator create a separate cryptographic seal and barrier keyring for each namespace so one tenant's own operators can be locked out of another tenant's secrets entirely, plus a workflow engine for coordinating requests across multiple plugins, distroless container images that ship nothing but the OpenBao binary itself, and authenticated replacements for what had been an unauthenticated root-token generation endpoint. Alex Scheel, who goes by "cipherboy" and chairs OpenBao's Technical Steering Committee and Development Working Group, joined the consultancy ControlPlane as head of OpenBao development in March 2026, TechTarget reported. OpenBao's own repository has 7,735 stars on GitHub, up 49 in the 24 hours before Friday, and is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, the same license Vault carried before HashiCorp's 2023 change. Its open issue count, 324 as of Friday, is a fraction of what a project at HashiCorp's former commercial scale would carry, a reminder that OpenBao is still closer to a community project than a company's product line.

The scale OpenBao has not closed

HashiCorp reported more than 4,300 enterprise customers in 2023, before the license change. OpenBao, by contrast, has 8 companies offering commercial professional support for the fork, according to TechTarget's reporting. "The ecosystem is clearly not at IBM or HashiCorp scale yet," cloud and AI engineering executive Varun Raj told the publication. Anuj Tyagi, a senior site reliability engineer at a communications company, put it more simply: "It's similar to the Community version of Vault with free licensing."

Project	Metric	Count
HashiCorp Vault	Enterprise customers (2023)	4,300+
OpenBao	Companies offering commercial support	8
OpenTofu	Individuals listed as supporters	791

ControlPlane's own client base points at where OpenBao adoption is concentrated: Aiman Alsari, the firm's head of Asia Pacific, told TechTarget that "of our strong leads and current clients, I'd say it's about 75% outside the U.S." That geography helps explain why a Santa Clara company the size of Nvidia showing up on the public adopters list registered as news to begin with: most of the fork's visible commercial traction, by ControlPlane's own account, sits outside the market HashiCorp built Vault's business around.

OpenBao's path mirrors other forks born from a license fight: Docker handed its own agent-sandbox Kit specification to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation the same week it announced Cloud Sandboxes, and Anthropic gave away the Agent Skills format rather than keep it proprietary. What none of those donations guarantee is scale. OpenBao's next concrete test is whether the Open Source Security Foundation moves it out of sandbox status, a decision the foundation has not scheduled, and whether a second named company the size of Nvidia joins the adopters list before OpenBao's own maintainers next report contributor numbers. Nvidia has not said publicly how many of its own products beyond Nvidia Cloud Functions route secrets through OpenBao, and its documentation describes the vault-system namespace only as it applies to NVCF's own Kubernetes clusters, not the rest of Nvidia's internal infrastructure.

Sources

1. Infrastructure | NVIDIA Cloud Functions (NVIDIA)
2. Nvidia adopts OpenBao, open source fork of HashiCorp's Vault (TechTarget)
3. Announcing OpenBao v2.6! (Open Source Security Foundation)
4. openbao/openbao (GitHub)