Secrets Management with Vault

We deploy Vault in high-availability mode: 3 or 5 node Raft cluster behind a load balancer, auto-unseal with AWS KMS or GCP CKMS, and TLS termination with certificates from a private CA. Storage backend uses integrated Raft storage for simplicity or Consul for larger deployments. Vault runs in a dedicated VPC with no public access. Backup and restore procedures are tested and documented. The deployment is fully automated via Terraform and Ansible — reproducible from scratch in under 30 minutes.

Static credentials are a security liability — they get shared, they do not expire, and they are impossible to audit. Vault's dynamic secrets engines generate unique, short-lived credentials on demand. PostgreSQL credentials are created per-request with 1-hour TTL. AWS IAM credentials are generated for each CI/CD run and revoked after the job completes. Each credential is unique to the requestor, automatically expires, and is logged in the Vault audit trail. No more shared database passwords.

Applications authenticate to Vault using Kubernetes service account tokens (Vault Agent injector), IAM roles (AWS auth method), or AppRole for CI/CD pipelines. Vault Agent runs as a sidecar container that automatically retrieves and renews secrets, writing them to a shared volume or environment. Application code reads secrets from a file path — no Vault SDK required. Secret rotation is transparent to the application. We provide integration examples for Node.js, Python, Go, and Java.

Every Vault operation is logged in the audit trail: who requested which secret, when, from which IP, and whether the request was approved. Audit logs are stored in an immutable, separate system. Access policies use Vault's ACL system — each application gets access to its own secrets path only. Policy changes require PR review and approval. Vault's seal/unseal operations are logged and monitored. The audit trail satisfies SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI DSS requirements for credential management.