OpenFGA Becomes a CNCF Incubating Project

What is OpenFGA? OpenFGA’s History Maintainer Perspective From the TOC Main Components Notable Milestones Looking Ahead Posted on November 11, 2025 by OpenFGA Project Maintainers CNCF projects highlighted in this post The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept OpenFGA as a CNCF incubating project. OpenFGA is an authorization engine that addresses the challenge of implementing complex access control at scale in modern software applications. Inspired by Google’s global access control system, Zanzibar, OpenFGA leverages Relationship-Based Access Control (ReBAC). This allows developers to define permissions based on relationships between users and objects (e. g. , who can view which document). By serving as an external service with an API and multiple SDKs, it centralizes and abstracts the authorization logic out of the application code. This separation of concerns significantly improves developer velocity by simplifying security implementation and ensures that access rules are consistent, scalable, and easy to audit across all services, solving a critical complexity problem for developers building distributed systems. OpenFGA was developed by a group of Okta employees, and is the foundation for the Auth0 FGA commercial offering. The project was accepted as a CNCF Sandbox project in September 2022. Since then, it has been deployed by hundreds of companies and received multiple contributions. Some major moments and updates include: 37 companies publicly acknowledge using it in production.