OpenChoreo was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox as an open-source Kubernetes developer platform positioned to add the execution layer Backstage lacks.
Backstage handles catalogs, docs and templates, but the report argues teams hit a "messy middle" when they wire it directly to CI/CD, GitOps, Kubernetes and observability tools through brittle integrations.
OpenChoreo's answer is a control plane that compiles higher-level abstractions into Kubernetes resources, enforces policies, reconciles drift and feeds runtime state back into a Backstage-powered portal.
Its architecture separates 5 planes—experience, control, data, observability and an optional workflow plane—so developers work with components and dependencies while platform teams manage environments, pipelines and traits.
OpenChoreo 1.0 is also being built for AI agents via MCP servers, CLI and agent skills, with a built-in SRE agent using logs, metrics and traces to suggest likely root causes.