56 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
56 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
---
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layout: docs
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page_title: Use Cases
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description: >-
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This page lists some concrete use cases for Vault, but the possible use cases
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are much broader than what we cover.
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---
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# Use Cases
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Before understanding use cases, it's useful to know [what Vault is](/intro).
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This page lists some concrete use cases for Vault, but the possible use cases are
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much broader than what we cover.
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#### General Secret Storage
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At a bare minimum, Vault can be used for the storage of any secrets. For
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example, Vault would be a fantastic way to store sensitive environment variables,
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database credentials, API keys, etc.
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Compare this with the current way to store these which might be
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plaintext in files, configuration management, a database, etc. It would be
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much safer to query these using `vault read` or the API. This protects
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the plaintext version of these secrets as well as records access in the Vault
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audit log.
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#### Employee Credential Storage
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While this overlaps with "General Secret Storage", Vault is a good mechanism
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for storing credentials that employees share to access web services. The
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audit log mechanism lets you know what secrets an employee accessed and
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when an employee leaves, it is easier to roll keys and understand which keys
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have and haven't been rolled.
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#### API Key Generation for Scripts
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The "dynamic secrets" feature of Vault is ideal for scripts: an AWS
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access key can be generated for the duration of a script, then revoked.
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The keypair will not exist before or after the script runs, and the
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creation of the keys are completely logged.
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This is an improvement over using something like Amazon IAM but still
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effectively hardcoding limited-access access tokens in various places.
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#### Data Encryption
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In addition to being able to store secrets, Vault can be used to
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encrypt/decrypt data that is stored elsewhere. The primary use of this is
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to allow applications to encrypt their data while still storing it in the
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primary data store.
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The benefit of this is that developers do not need to worry about how to
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properly encrypt data. The responsibility of encryption is on Vault
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and the security team managing it, and developers just encrypt/decrypt
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data as needed.
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