Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Keywhiz: What are the differences?
Amazon EC2 Container Service: Container management service that supports Docker containers. Amazon EC2 Container Service lets you launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows you to query the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles; Keywhiz: A system for distributing and managing secrets. Keywhiz is a secret management and distribution service that is now available for everyone. Keywhiz helps us with infrastructure secrets, including TLS certificates and keys, GPG keyrings, symmetric keys, database credentials, API tokens, and SSH keys for external services — and even some non-secrets like TLS trust stores. Automation with Keywhiz allows us to seamlessly distribute and generate the necessary secrets for our services, which provides a consistent and secure environment, and ultimately helps us ship faster.
Amazon EC2 Container Service and Keywhiz are primarily classified as "Containers as a Service" and "Secrets Management" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Amazon EC2 Container Service are:
- Docker Compatibility
- Managed Clusters
- Programmatic Control
On the other hand, Keywhiz provides the following key features:
- Keywhiz Server provides JSON APIs for accessing and managing secrets. It is written in Java and based on Dropwizard.
- KeywhizFs is a FUSE-based file system, providing secrets as if they are files in a directory. Transparently, secrets are retrieved from a Keywhiz Server using mTLS with a client certificate.
- Presenting secrets as files makes Keywhiz compatible with nearly all software. Outside of Keywhiz administration, consumers of secrets only have to know how to read a file.
Keywhiz is an open source tool with 2.09K GitHub stars and 166 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Keywhiz's open source repository on GitHub.
