External Secrets Operator at a Turning Point

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ESO At a Crossroads

Over the past few weeks, the maintainers of the External Secrets Operator (ESO) announced a pause on new open source releases until more active maintainers from the community step in to help. The decision, discussed on GitHub and in community Slack channels, came after a sustained period of maintainer burnout and increasing demands from production users. If you’ve missed these updates, the short version is this: ESO is still very much alive, but the project needs more hands on deck to sustain its growth.

Why now? Because the longer this gap remains, the more pressure builds on the maintainers still involved - and the harder it becomes to ship timely releases, security updates, and new features. If your team relies on ESO in production, this is the moment to get involved, whether by contributing engineering time, sponsoring work, or moving to a supported enterprise distribution. Every bit of help today makes a measurable difference in how quickly ESO can recover and grow.

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Our Commitment to ESO and a Vendor-Neutral Future

Our position at External Secrets Inc. is simple - we have always supported – and will continue to strongly support – ESO. We were born out of the same community that created the operator, and we continue to invest significantly in its health. That means contributing code, fixes, and features upstream whenever possible, because a strong and healthy ESO benefits everyone, including our customers. Ultimately, if ESO needs us, we will step up and fulfill any roles or gaps it might have.

That said, the vision for External Secrets Inc. – and our Professional and Enterprise versions of External Secrets – Enterprise has always gone beyond commercial support. We are working to build a vendor-neutral ground for contribution - an Open Core space where new ideas and features can be developed openly, without locking users into a single ecosystem. A space where the community can feel safe to participate, knowing their contributions benefit everyone. By protecting this neutrality, we help ensure that the External Secrets ecosystem stays transparent, collaborative, and sustainable over the long term.

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Enterprise Stability for Production ESO Users

As for our enterprise offering, our focus is on what happens within your organization after secrets arrive. More often than not, credentials end up shared across environments and projects where they never should be. It’s difficult for anyone to confidently say there is no credentials misuse within their organization - even if the entire company uses ESO to move secrets from their vault into Kubernetes. External Secrets Enterprise adds the guardrails, governance, and tooling to address these internal risks.

We believe that open source and enterprise can coexist in a way that strengthens both. Open source provides transparency, shared innovation, and a broad ecosystem; enterprise ensures stability, predictable releases, and features designed for high-security and compliance-sensitive environments. Together, they create a balance where no single vendor controls the project, yet everyone benefits from its progress.

The road ahead for ESO will require active community involvement. If your organization depends on ESO, we encourage you to contribute - whether through code, documentation, sponsorship, or simply helping others in the community. And for those needing production-grade guarantees today, the enterprise option is ready to deliver without compromising the open source mission.

For organizations running ESO on critical infrastructure in production, there’s another important point: External Secrets Enterprise can be installed as a drop-in replacement for ESO. You can keep your existing manifests, workflows, and tooling - but gain enterprise-grade SLAs, support, and advanced capabilities. Our installation guide walks you through the process step-by-step, so teams can switch with minimal disruption.

At External Secrets Inc., we’re committed to building for the stability our customers need now and the sustainability the open source project needs for the future. ESO’s mission is our mission - and we intend to see it thrive.

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