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Learn Secret Management - Pre-Requisites Skills & Environment Setup
Before diving into OpenBao, you need to prepare a few foundational skills and tools, from understanding symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, REST API and JSON basics, to installing the OpenBao CLI and running a dev-mode server to practice throughout this entire series.
August 3, 2026
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#1
Learn Secret Management - Fork History, Linux Foundation Manifesto & Why Choose OpenBao
Tracing the birth of OpenBao as a fork of HashiCorp Vault in December 2023 under the Linux Foundation, the commitment to being 100 percent open source under the MPL-2.0 license, backward compatibility with Vault 1.15.x, and the reasons to choose OpenBao for modern secret management.
August 3, 2026
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#2
Learn Secret Management - Core Architecture & Initialization Operations (Raft Storage & Unsealing)
Dissecting OpenBao's architecture from the Raft and Consul storage backends to the barrier engine, the initialization process with Shamir secret sharing, manual unsealing, auto-unseal via cloud KMS, and best practices for managing the root token.
August 3, 2026
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#3
Learn Secret Management - KV Secrets Engine (KeyValue v1 vs KV v2 with Versioning)
Getting to know the secrets engine, enabling KV v2, comparing KV v1 and KV v2 from versioning, metadata, soft delete to permanent destroy, as well as the CLI operations bao kv put, get, list, rollback, and destroy.
August 3, 2026
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#4
Learn Secret Management - Dynamic Database Secrets Engine (Short-Lived Credentials)
Shifting the credential paradigm from static to dynamic, configuring PostgreSQL and MySQL connections in OpenBao, writing database roles with creation statements and TTLs, and retrieving short-lived credentials.
August 3, 2026
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#5
Learn Secret Management - Transit Secrets Engine (Encryption-as-a-Service / EaaS)
Getting to know the Transit Secrets Engine as Encryption-as-a-Service, creating an encryption key, encrypting sensitive data with base64 plaintext, decrypting it again, and understanding why OpenBao does not store the data.
August 3, 2026
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#6
Learn Secret Management - PKI Secrets Engine (Automatic CA)
Turning OpenBao into an internal Root CA and Intermediate CA, issuing TLS certificates on-demand with short TTLs, and understanding the role of policies in automating certificate issuance for internal services that communicate over TLS.
August 3, 2026
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#7
Learn Secret Management - Access Control Policies (HCL)
Writing HCL-format access rules that determine who may access which path in OpenBao, distinguishing exact paths from prefix wildcards, understanding all capabilities, and testing privilege enforcement via policy write and token create.
August 3, 2026
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#8
Learn Secret Management - Authentication Methods (Token, AppRole, Userpass, OIDC)
Understanding how users and machines identify themselves to OpenBao through auth methods, distinguishing the service, batch, periodic, and orphan token types, and enabling userpass, OIDC SSO, and AppRole for different authentication needs.
August 3, 2026
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#9
Learn Secret Management - Lease Management, Renewal & Emergency Revocation
Managing the lifecycle of dynamic secrets in OpenBao: understanding Lease IDs and TTLs, extending the lifetime with bao lease renew, and revoking access instantly with bao lease revoke and revoke by prefix when credentials leak.
August 3, 2026
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