Brightbox vs OpenStack Barbican
Brightbox
brightbox.comOpenStack Barbican
docs.openstack.orgSide by side
| Figure | Brightbox | OpenStack Barbican |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | £0.05/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 1 |
| Spec score · Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (Cloud IaaS) Software | 8.3 (#4) | 7.3 (#12) |
| Integrations | The homepage lists Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, a REST API, a command line interface, Ruby Fog, and a Brightbox Terraform provider among its tools and integrations. | Documented secret-store plugins include KMIP, Dogtag, and Vault, alongside PKCS#11 crypto plugins. |
Plans
Brightbox
- Orbit Object Storage£0.05 a month
- Block Storage Volume£0.10 a month
- 512mb.ssd Cloud Server£5 a month
- Load Balancer£20 a month
- Cloud SQL SSD 2GB£30 a month
In their own words
OpenStack Barbican
OpenStack Barbican is the OpenStack Key Manager service for storing, provisioning, and managing secrets such as keys, certificates, passwords, and raw binary data. Its barbican-api component provides an OpenStack-native REST API for managing secrets; barbican-worker and barbican-keystone-listener are also part of the service. The listener manages Barbican’s database records for Keystone projects when those projects are deleted. A plugin architecture lets operators connect software secret stores or hardware such as HSMs. Documented options include KMIP, Dogtag, and Vault secret-store plugins, as well as PKCS#11 crypto plugins. With PKCS#11, master encryption and HMAC keys can reside in an HSM. Operators can develop plugins for storage, generation, and event handling, though support status may be stable, experimental, or out-of-tree. The default Simple Crypto plugin stores its single encryption key in plaintext in barbican.conf, so service-node access must be restricted carefully. Container ACL settings do not carry over to associated secrets, and ACL functionality requires Keystone integration. Barbican is free under Apache 2.0; installation guidance assumes a working OpenStack deployment.