AWS Security Blog
One of the most common questions about secrets management strategies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is whether an organization should centralize its secrets. Though this question is often focused on whether secrets should be centrally stored, there are four aspects of centralizing the secrets management process that need to be considered: creation, storage, rotation, and monitoring. In this post, we discuss the advantages and tradeoffs of centralizing or decentralizing each of these aspects of secrets management.
When deciding whether to centralize secrets creation, you should consider how you already deploy infrastructure in the cloud. Modern DevOps practices have driven some organizations toward developer portals and internal developer platforms that use golden paths for infrastructure deployment. By using tools that use golden paths, developers can deploy infrastructure in a self-service model through infrastructure as code (IaC) while adhering to organizational standards.
A central function maintains these golden paths, such as a platform engineering team. Examples of services that can be used to maintain and define golden paths might include AWS services such as AWS Service Catalog or popular open source projects such as Backstage.io. Using this approach, developers can focus on application code while platform engineers focus on infrastructure deployment, security controls, and developer tooling. An example of a golden path might be a templatized implementation for a microservice that writes to a database.
For example, a golden path could define that a service or application must be built using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and use AWS Secrets Manager to retrieve database credentials. The platform team could also build checks to help ensure that the secret’s resource policy only allows access to the role being used by the microservice and is encrypted with a customer managed key. This pattern abstracts deployments away from developers and facilitates resource deployment across accounts. This is one example of a centralized creation pattern, shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Architecture diagram highlighting the developer portal deployment pattern for centralized creation