Recently, HashiCorp announced the general availability of their fully managed Vault service for AWS environments on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP). With Vault, customers can leverage a SaaS service with secret management and encryption capabilities.
Earlier this year, the company made a public beta available, including a push-button feature to deploy a Vault cluster. The service allows its users to secure, store, and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, encryption keys, and other sensitive data. Furthermore, with its support for AWS environments, users also can enable secure secrets management across EC2, EKS, Lambda, and many other AWS services.
From a high-level perspective, Vault users first need to create a HashiCorp Cloud Platform account. Subsequently, they can deploy a Vault cluster from the dashboard. And finally, once their HashiCorp Virtual Network (HVN) and a Vault cluster are deployed, peer it to their existing AWS environments.
Source: https://youtu.be/FxcUf2spssE (Screenshot)
With the GA release of HCP Vault and HCP Consul, a service mesh offering, HashiCorp now has two services available on AWS. It’s not clear when these services will become available on Azure or the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Eventually, the company plans to have all of its products available on HCP, including its recently announced Boundary, an open-source project for identity-based access management.
Yet HashiCorp will compete with the offerings of the big three cloud providers such as Secrets Manager, AWS Key Management Service, Azure KeyVault, and Google Secrets Management and Sops; offerings that also have the attention of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which released a new radar on secrets management - showing a general shift away from relying on users to manage credentials to automation tools:
Vault has often been considered in the industry as a rather complex tool with high operational burden. However, the broad adoption makes sense when you consider many smaller organizations likely would prefer to outsource their secrets management rather than creating and maintaining an in-house solution.
And:
If an organization has a decent amount of information to protect and is not already locked into a cloud provider, Vault provides a comprehensive solution whose complexity is matched by a robust feature set. It also appears to be a convenient solution for multi-cloud environments.
Currently, HCP Vault is available in AWS regions in the U.S. (Oregon and Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, and London), with more regions to come. Furthermore, with the GA release, pricing details are available on the pricing page.