AWS Certificate Manager is a service that lets users provision, manage, and deploy public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services and internal connected resources.
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HashiCorp Vault
Score 8.4 out of 10
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HashiCorp offers Vault, an encryption tool of use in the management of secrets including credentials, passwords and other secrets, providing access control, audit trail, and support for multiple authentication methods. It is available open source, or under an enterprise license.
Ability to upload our clients' private ssl certificates to then be used across other AWS services. Great to integrate with Route53 and be able to generate internal SSL certificates to be used across other services.
Vault is a reliable and resilient as the Key Management System. It is not for the novice user that does not have a background in information security. It requires a significant time investment into the different key engines that the solution offers to get started. It works very well once implemented and is very flexible in general.
HashiCorp Vault is the best there is out there, and it has become critical to our secret management use cases. It would be difficult to find anything that would suit our needs better and that would be beneficial for us to switch over to.
AWS historically has had very confusing interfaces. But in recent times they have improved them. AWS Certificate Manager is a clear sample of this. The interface is clear and straightforward, with no useless or cryptic options. Really I can't think of a way the interface could be better with the actual options available.
We spent a little more time than we imagined to conceptually understand how HashiCorp Vault operates, as well as how it is configured. This is not trivial, and keep in mind that you will need to take some time to get a thorough understanding of the tool. The documentation could be more helpful in this regard.
Hashicorp has been very responsive to our questions and inquiries up to this point. We are currently working on them to develop a more granular permissions model within Vault. We are very close to achieving our objectives with the help of their support team. We do not seem to be in the same time zone which makes it hard for escalated issues.
Easy to implement within a few clicks, or even from command line, the alternatives doesn't integrate that easy with AWS Application Load Balancers or AWS CloudFront
HashiCorp Vault integrates with a lot of tools and systems, and the documentation was pretty robust with a lot of community help. Because HashiCorp Vault is also older than other solutions, it is already well developed with a lot of features you need for storing secrets and configuration. HashiCorp Vault is also friendlier towards application build and is focused in providing security and a lot of customization for almost any use case scenario. Bitwarden is more limited to password management of enterprise accounts, but for application usage is not that great or easy to integrate. It does not scale well also. AWS Secrets Manager on the other hand is really good but more limited to AWS applications and vendor lock is problematic as well for such a critical piece of infrastructure.
