Openchoreo

A complete, open-source developer platform for Kubernetes

OpenChoreo is a developer platform for Kubernetes that lets developers and AI agents build, deploy, and operate apps, resources, and agentic workloads. It provides development and platform abstractions, a Backstage-powered developer portal, CI/CD, GitOps, and observability.

Why OpenChoreo?

Kubernetes gives you powerful primitives like Namespaces, Deployments, CronJobs, Services, and NetworkPolicies, but they're too low-level for most developers. Platform engineers end up building the actual platform from scratch: defining higher-level abstractions, wiring together tools for delivery, security and observability, and maintaining all of it as an in-house product.

That means stitching together a developer portal, CI pipelines, GitOps workflows, an observability stack, and access controls and then owning the glue between them indefinitely. The result is a fragile, bespoke system that's expensive to maintain and hard to evolve.

Developers and platform engineers need different things from the same platform. Developers want a simple, self-service experience. Platform engineers want control over what's running underneath. Most DIY platforms end up optimizing for one side at the expense of the other.

What is OpenChoreo?

OpenChoreo, now a CNCF Sandbox project, takes a different approach. Instead of giving you a toolkit to assemble your own platform, it provides a complete, open-source developer platform for Kubernetes with abstractions that translate developer intent into platform reality. So platform engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel, and developers get a self-service experience that stays out of their way.

Under the hood, OpenChoreo brings together a Backstage-powered developer portal, built-in CI and GitOps, observability, RBAC, and analytics and all of them are organized across dedicated control, CI, data, and observability planes. Platform engineers get a production-ready foundation they can operate and extend, not scaffolding they'll eventually replace.

OpenChoreo was originally developed by WSO2, based on its experience building the SaaS internal developer platform formerly known as WSO2 Choreo (now WSO2 Developer Platform), bringing its core ideas to the open-source community. It's not a fork or an open-source dump; it's a complete rewrite based on what we learned from Choreo’s users over the years.

How does OpenChoreo work?

OpenChoreo is built around a multi-plane architecture, where each plane handles a distinct concern and operates independently.

• The Experience Plane is where developers, platform engineers, and SREs interact with the platform via a Backstage-powered OpenChoreo Portal, CLI, GitOps, or AI agents.

• The Control Plane sits at the center of OpenChoreo. It takes developer intent and platform intent expressed through high-level abstractions like components, endpoints, dependencies, environments, pipelines, and namespaces and translates them into the underlying Kubernetes resources. It also reflects runtime reality back up, so what developers see always matches what's actually running.

• The Data Plane is where your workloads run. It is where OpenChoreo enforces and guarantees the semantics of those high-level abstractions, such as isolation between projects, traffic policies, and security boundaries. These aren't just configurations; they're guaranteed by the platform.