What is Vault?
Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.
Vault is a tool in the Secrets Management category of a tech stack.
Vault is an open source tool with 31.3K GitHub stars and 4.2K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Vault's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Vault?
Companies
259 companies reportedly use Vault in their tech stacks, including Robinhood, trivago, and main.
Developers
494 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Vault.
Vault Integrations
Amazon EKS, 1Password, Nomad, StackStorm, and Gaia are some of the popular tools that integrate with Vault. Here's a list of all 12 tools that integrate with Vault.
Pros of Vault
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Decisions about Vault
Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Vault in their tech stack.
Priyanka Singh
Hi, Could you please suggest which would be better to use Vault or Keycloak for user authentication and password?
Blog Posts
Vault's Features
- Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. Vault can write to disk, Consul, and more.
- Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.
- Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without having to design their own encryption methods.
- Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in Vault have a lease associated with it. At the end of the lease, Vault will automatically revoke that secret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.
- Revocation: Vault has built-in support for secret revocation. Vault can revoke not only single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example all secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type. Revocation assists in key rolling as well as locking down systems in the case of an intrusion.
Vault Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Vault?
Akeyless
Unified SaaS Vault platform built to secure DevOps credentials and access to production resources across hybrid cloud and legacy environments.
Consul
Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.
Surge
Surge makes it easy for developers to deploy projects to a production-quality CDN through Grunt, Gulp, npm.
CyberArk
It is the only security software company focused on eliminating cyber threats using insider privileges to attack the heart of the enterprise.
AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. The service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.