OpenChoreo: An Open-Source Internal Developer Platform Built by Platform Engineers for the Enterprise

Modern software teams are expected to move fast, stay secure, and operate reliably across an ever-growing sprawl of services, clouds, and teams. While Kubernetes and the CNCF ecosystem provide powerful building blocks, assembling them into a usable platform is far from straightforward—especially at enterprise scale.

OpenChoreo is an open-source Internal Developer Platform (IDP) created to address this challenge. It’s built by platform engineers for platform engineers—with the goal of enabling software teams to focus on delivering business value, not wiring infrastructure.

One of the key challenges we faced was navigating the CNCF landscape. With hundreds of projects available, there's no one-size-fits-all stack. Choosing the right set of tools meant analyzing maturity, production-readiness, ecosystem compatibility, and—importantly—leaning on our own past experience building cloud-native platforms. OpenChoreo reflects those choices.

Rather than exposing developers to raw Kubernetes CRDs or YAML overload, OpenChoreo provides a set of high-level, familiar abstractions—organization, project, component, build, and deployment. These map cleanly to how teams work and help separate infrastructure concerns from application logic.

Going beyond automation, OpenChoreo applies Domain-Driven Design (DDD) using a cell-based architecture. Each “cell” represents a bounded context—an independently deployed, observable, and governed unit of software aligned with business domains. This makes it easier to scale teams, isolate failures, and maintain architectural clarity.

OpenChoreo stitches together a set of open-source tools we know and trust:

• Argo Workflows for GitOps-native CI/CD

• Envoy for API and service management

• Cilium for secure, identity-aware networking

• Buildpacks to simplify container builds

• OpenSearch for observability and log analytics

• HashiCorp Vault for secrets and configuration

The platform supports multi-cloud deployment, secure multi-tenancy, and consistent environment promotion workflows—without compromising developer velocity or platform governance.

OpenChoreo is still a work in progress. Through this talk, we want to introduce the project, share why we built it, and explain how it works—from its architecture to the tooling choices behind it. More importantly, we’re hoping to connect with others who are solving similar problems. If you're working on platform engineering, building internal tools for developers, or exploring how to make the CNCF stack more usable—we’d love to get your thoughts, feedback, and support as we continue developing OpenChoreo.

• Why Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) are essential for modern enterprise software delivery

• How platform engineers can abstract complex infrastructure using familiar concepts like organization/project/component/build/deployment

• How OpenChoreo brings together open-source tools (Argo, Envoy, Cilium, Buildpacks, Vault, OpenSearch etc) into a cohesive developer platform

• How Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is implemented through a cell-based architecture to model bounded contexts as independently deployable units

• Lessons learned from running the SaaS version of Choreo in production, and how those insights are shaping OpenChoreo

• How OpenChoreo is evolving toward CNCF sandbox status—and how contributors can get involved