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| layout | page_title | sidebar_current | description |
|---|---|---|---|
| docs | Namespaces - Vault Enterprise | docs-vault-enterprise-namespaces | Vault Enterprise has support for Namespaces, a feature to enable Secure Multi-tenancy (SMT) and self-management. |
Vault Enterprise Namespaces
Overview
Many organizations implement Vault as a "service", providing centralized management for teams within an organization while ensuring that those teams operate within isolated environments known as tenants.
There are two common challenges when implementing this architecture in Vault:
Tenant Isolation
Frequently teams within a VaaS environment require strong isolation from other users in their policies, secrets, and identitys. Tenant isolation is typically a result of compliance regulations such as GDPR, though it may be necessitated by corporate or organizational infosec requirements.
Self-Management
As new tenants are added, there is an additional human cost in the management overhead for teams. Given that tenants will likely have different policies and request changes at a different rate, managing a multi-tenant environment can become very difficult for a single team as the number of tenants within that organization grow.
'Namespaces' is a set of features within Vault Enterprise that allows Vault environments to support Secure Multi-tenancy (or SMT) within a single Vault infrastructure. Through namespaces, Vault administrators can support tenant isolation for teams and individuals as well as empower delegated administrators to manage their own tenant environment.
Architecture
Namespaces are isolated environments that functionally exist as "Vaults within a Vault." They have separate login paths and support creating and managing data isolated to their namespace. This data includes the following:
- Secret Engine Mounts
- Policies
- Identities (Entities, Groups)
- Tokens
Namespaces can also be configured to inherit all of this data from a higher parent namespace. This simplifies the deployment of new namespaces, and can be combined with sentinel policies to prescribe organization-wide infosec policies on tenants.
Rather than rely on Vault system admins, namespaces can be managed by delegated admins who can be prescribed administration rights for their namespace. These delegated admins can also create their own child namespaces, thereby prescribing admin rights on a subordinate group of delegate admins.
Setup and Best Practices
A deployment guide is available to help guide you through the deployment and administration of namespaces, and contains examples on architecture for using namespaces to implement SMT across your organization.