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Re:Secret Management with Vault by tedmiston on Friday October 28, 2016 @05:11PM (#12820760)
I considered Vault for a recent project but ultimately chose not to use it. I'd like to hear more discussion around the alternatives to Vault that you considered (there are many for different use cases) and why you ultimately chose Vault.
Re:Secret Management with Vault by josegonzalez on Friday October 28, 2016 @06:54PM (#12821458)
We initially looked around, and here are a few alternatives:

    - Azure Key Vault: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/key-vault/
    - Blackbox: https://github.com/StackExchange/blackbox
    - CredStash: https://github.com/fugue/credstash
    - Lyft Confydant: https://github.com/lyft/confidant
    - Trousseau: https://github.com/oleiade/trousseau
    - Sneaker: https://github.com/codahale/sneaker
Some of these didn't exist when we were first investigating proper secret management, while others didn't fit as well with our deployment strategy. We're using what works when it makes sense - Blackbox is used in some repos, for instance - but I'll be sure the next time we have an internal doc like this that we cover why we didn't choose a different set of tools.

One thing we liked about Vault is that it built upon our usage of Consul and the http interface for Vault meant it was simple to plug into how we build and deploy services. While I'm sure some of these other tools would have had as good workflows, our experience in administrating Consul made it easier for us to have confidence in Vault.

Re:Secret Management with Vault by alexsmolen on Friday October 28, 2016 @06:43PM (#12821388)
I recently helped build a secret store system for our infrastructure, and we decided to not use Vault.

A big reason was that Vault’s AWS authentication backend is not based on AWS infrastructure like IAM/KMS, but uses a somewhat backhanded method (https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/auth/aws-ec2.html) to establish verify an EC2 instance. We use ECS, and it doesn't play well with it - see https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/issues/1298

Instead, we would have had to fall back to the App ID method, which requires separate configuration, and is “Trust On First Use” so doesn’t offer as strong of security guarantees in my opinion.

Also, the only Hashicorp supported-backends are file (non-HA) and Consul.

If you're all-AWS, I'd recommend checking out Confidant/Knox (run as a separate service) or Credstash/Biscuit (run directly against AWS infra).

Re:Secret Management with Vault by Rapzid on Friday October 28, 2016 @06:57PM (#12821476)
We ended up just rolling something with AWS KMS and DynamoDB. Vault looks great though, it's just overkill for our needs ATM. One day maybe.
Re:Secret Management with Vault by conorgil145 on Friday October 28, 2016 @06:03PM (#12821149)
Why did you decide not to use Vault? Did it fail to meet a requirement? Over kill? Learning curve? Other?
Re:Secret Management with Vault by tedmiston on Friday October 28, 2016 @06:36PM (#12821356)
Yes, mostly overkill and team learning curve. I just needed a simple, higher abstraction for storing API keys and secrets.

Integration with a CI bot is another consideration.