Re:Confidant: an open-source secret management service
by pamad05 on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @06:52PM
(#10510650)
Hi, quick question since you seem to be on top of Vault.
My team and I were investigating possible configuration options and secret management, and we couldn't figure out a good reason as to why the tool doesn't use S3 as one of the backends, which would essentially eliminate the need to maintain our own etcd/consul/sql whatever - plus, since the entire thing is path based, it seems incredibly well suited for that backend.
I couldn't think of one, but I might be missing something.
"Buys into the HashiCorp ecosystem": Consul is completely optional. We also support ZooKeeper, SQL, etcd, and more. There is zero forced tie to Consul. HCL is correct though!
"you can't just stick N Vault servers behind an LB": Actually, that is exactly what we recommend! https://vaultproject.io/docs/concepts/ha.html Vault servers are stateful in that there can only be one leader, but we use leader election and all data is stored in the storage backends, so it can die without issue.
"90% of applications just require a secure place to store secret blobs": Just use Vault out of the box. You'll have to configure only storage, after that you can use the token you get from initialization (one form of auth) and the `/secret` path to store arbitrary blobs that is preconfigured (one form of backend).