At uSwitch we use Vault to generate short lived database credentials for our applications running in Kubernetes. We wanted to move from an environment where we had 100 dbs with a variety of static passwords being shared around to a place where each pod would have credentials that only last for its lifetime.

We chose vault because:

• It had built in Kubernetes support so we could use service accounts to permission which pods could access which database.

• A terraform provider so that we could configure both our RDS instances and their vault configuration in one place.

• A variety of database providers including MySQL/PostgreSQL (our most common dbs).

• A good api/Go -sdk so that we could build tooling around it to simplify development worfklow.

• It had other features we would utilise such as PKI