44 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
44 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
layout: "intro"
|
|
page_title: "Use Cases"
|
|
sidebar_current: "use-cases"
|
|
description: |-
|
|
This page lists some concrete use cases for Vault, but the possible use cases are much broader than what we cover.
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
# Use Cases
|
|
|
|
Before understanding use cases, it's useful to know [what Vault is](/intro/index.html).
|
|
This page lists some concrete use cases for Vault, but the possible use cases are
|
|
much broader than what we cover.
|
|
|
|
#### General Secret Storage
|
|
|
|
At a bare minimum, Vault can be used for the storage of any secrets. For
|
|
example, Vault would be a fantastic way to store sensitive environment variables,
|
|
database credentials, API keys, etc.
|
|
|
|
Compare this with the current way to store these which might be
|
|
plaintext in files, configuration management, a database, etc. It would be
|
|
much safer to query these using `vault read` or the API. This protects
|
|
the plaintext version of these secrets as well as records access in the Vault
|
|
audit log.
|
|
|
|
#### Employee Credential Storage
|
|
|
|
While this overlaps with "General Secret Storage", Vault is a good mechanism
|
|
for storing credentials that employees share to access web services. The
|
|
audit log mechanism lets you know what secrets an employee accessed and
|
|
when an employee leaves, it is easier to roll keys and understand which keys
|
|
have and haven't been rolled.
|
|
|
|
#### API Key Generation for Scripts
|
|
|
|
The "dynamic secrets" feature of Vault is ideal for scripts: an AWS
|
|
access key can be generated for the duration of a script, then revoked.
|
|
The keypair will not exist before or after the script runs, and the
|
|
creation of the keys are completely logged.
|
|
|
|
This is an improvement over using something like Amazon IAM but still
|
|
effectively hardcoding limited-access access tokens in various places.
|