Much to the team’s consternation, they often get asked: isn’t OpenChoreo the same as Backstage? The project does include a Backstage-powered portal, but it goes beyond that. At WSO2con in Austin, I sat down with OpenChoreo maintainers Lakmal Warusawithana and Sameera Jayasoma to learn what the project does, how it got here, and where it’s going.
Abstracting Kubernetes
OpenChoreo is a complete open-source internal developer platform built natively on Kubernetes, abstracting away the complexity to give developers self-service. The Backstage portal is just the front door. Behind it, the team has built out a control plane, a data plane, and observability.
From SaaS to CNCF
OpenChoreo began in 2020 as a WSO2 SaaS offering. Two years ago the team decided to open source it, and this January, after several months of effort, it was accepted as a CNCF sandbox project. Getting in wasn’t a walk in the park: hundreds of application questions, mapping where the project fits in the cloud-native landscape, then transferring the GitHub org, domains, and analytics over to the CNCF.
Once in, the benefits of the sandbox program (KubeCon talks, a project booth, open development on Slack) helped them draw a significant number of external contributors.
Agentic in nature
Today OpenChoreo is built for an agentic world. It ships with MCP servers and persona-based agents (SRE, FinOps, architect), an ecosystem marketplace for community-built agents and skills, and guardrails like AI gateways and token limits to keep agents in check.
As for what’s next, Lakmal and Sameera told me they have their sights set on getting into the CNCF incubation program and building up the community around the project.
To learn more or get involved, check out
- https://openchoreo.dev/
- https://github.com/openchoreo/openchoreo
- https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/04/openchoreo-10/
- https://openchoreo.dev/blog/openchoreo-joins-cncf-and-ships-1-0/
Pau for now…
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