What is AWS Secrets Manager?

Dmitry Broshkov
2 min readApr 20, 2023

Is a completely managed service that aids in securing the passwords required to access your resources, apps, and services. You can rotate, manage, and retrieve secrets with ease at any point in their lifecycle.

AWS Secrets Manager

Secrets like Secure Shell (SSH) keys, third-party API keys, and database login credentials can all be stored and managed by the service.
To assist you in managing the secrets used by other AWS services including Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Secrets Manager interfaces with each of these services.

AWS Secrets Manager’s Features and Advantages

Secure Storage
Your secrets are stored safely and securely by AWS Secrets Manager. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-256 encryption technique, the industry standard for data encryption, is used to encrypt all data.

Centralized Management
You can manage all of your secrets in one location thanks to Secrets Manager’s single administration console. You may keep an eye on how secrets are used and accessed, as well as see, create, and edit them as necessary.

Automatic Rotation
An automatic rotation of secrets is one of Secrets Manager’s main advantages. Secrets Manager will automatically generate new credentials and update them in your application when you set up an automated rotation for your secrets. This lessens the possibility of credentials being stolen and makes it simpler to abide by security laws.

Integration with AWS Services
To assist you in managing the secrets used by other AWS services like Amazon RDS, Amazon DocumentDB, and Amazon Redshift, Secrets Manager connects with them. These services can simply be configured to use secrets, and they will be updated automatically when the secrets are cycled.

Audit Logging
You can keep track of all the modifications made to your secrets with the help of the thorough audit logs that Secrets Manager offers. This assists you in meeting legal requirements and gives you insight into how your secrets are being used.

AWS Secrets Management:
- Capability force of rotation for each x day;
- Automate generation of secrets on rotation ( lambda should be used);
- Good integration with Amazon RDS;
- Can be encrypted by using the KMS service.

Multi-region secrets:
- Replicate secrets across multi regions;
- The secrets manager keeps reading the replica in sync with a primary replica;
- Use cases: multi-region apps, disaster recovery strategy, multi-region DB.

AWS Secrets Management

In Conclusion

AWS Secrets Manager is a robust and simple-to-use service that assists you in protecting sensitive data in the cloud. It offers secure and encrypted secret storage, centralised management, automatic rotation, and interaction with other AWS services.

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Dmitry Broshkov

Custom software and cloud Solutions | Data engineering Talks about #medtech, #appdevelopment and #softwaredevelopment