Opinionless Enforcement of Opinions on Operational Secrets

Opinionless Enforcement of Opinions on Operational Secrets The problem with providing unopinionated tools to a wide range of developers with minimal hand holding is you will quickly end up with the configuration equivalent of winding darkened tunnel...

Opinionless Enforcement of Opinions on Operational Secrets

The problem with providing unopinionated tools to a wide range of developers with minimal hand holding is you will quickly end up with the configuration equivalent of winding darkened tunnels, staircases that go nowhere, and rooms with no doors. As part of developing an internal "Secret Key Service" we quickly realized that allowing everyone at our organization free form access to the underlying tooling could rapidly result in a irreconcilable mess of operational secrets. We quickly created a new tool to provide a data driven approach for provisioning secrets into Vault, our secret storage tool of choice.

This tool was created internally and then open sourced as aomi. It provides two key concepts which have been aiding our efforts - data driven management of secrets and the ability to easily extract these secrets in a way which can be consumed by existing UNIXish applications. We have strived to create a tool with as few of it's own opinions as possible, all while aiming to have this tool enforce our own rigorously held opinions.