Secret management
Secret management is the practice of securely handling sensitive values throughout their lifecycle, including their storage, access, distribution, retrieval, and rotation.
Effective Platform Engineering
A secrets manager is a system that securely stores, controls access to, and rotates sensitive credentials and configuration values.
- How it is used
- Supplies pipelines and deployment workflows with credentials through a central platform capability.
- How deep it goes
- Works through credential bootstrap, pipeline retrieval, and overlapping-key rotation; leaves secrets-service internals unspecified.
- Examples
- Uses a CircleCI context holding a secrets-access credential and an AWS service-account pipeline that stores and rotates keys.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure a pipeline to retrieve centrally stored credentials and take over rotation after a manual first-time bootstrap.
Read how Effective Platform Engineering explains secret management →
Data Pipelines with Apache Airflow, Second Edition
A secrets manager is an external system that securely stores and provides sensitive values such as credentials and keys.
- How it is used
- Keeps Airflow connections and variables available to tasks while obtaining their secrets from central storage.
- How deep it goes
- Explains backend configuration, secret paths, required keys, and a DAG lookup; does not develop secret rotation procedures.
- Examples
- Uses a Vault-backed HttpOperator connection and contrasts production secret storage with local AWS credential-file testing.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure it: configure an Airflow secrets backend and store connection details under the expected path and key.
Read how Data Pipelines with Apache Airflow, Second Edition explains secret management →
Building Web APIs with ASP.NET Core
Visual Studio Secret Manager is a development tool that stores application secrets outside the project source tree and loads them through user-secrets configuration.
- How it is used
- Secures connection strings and credentials during development.
- How deep it goes
- Shows how to open Secret Manager and add its project identifier, without detailing further configuration steps.
- Examples
- Uses a SQL Server connection string for the board-game API’s database.
- What you can do after
- Configure development credentials with Visual Studio Secret Manager and use the DefaultConnection key in database configuration.
Read how Building Web APIs with ASP.NET Core explains secret management →
Terraform in Depth: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and OpenTofu
A secret manager is software that securely stores, controls access to, and retrieves sensitive values such as credentials and API keys.
- How it is used
- Keeps deployment credentials and API keys out of plaintext inputs while making them available to Terraform or workloads.
- How deep it goes
- Explains identifier-based retrieval and compares Terraform data sources with direct workload retrieval, including the risk of secrets entering state.
- Examples
- Shows AWS, Vault, and Azure Terraform lookups and considers updating an API key across hundreds of projects.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Terraform data sources or configure an orchestrator to retrieve secrets without passing their values through Terraform.
.NET in Action, Second Edition
Secret Manager is a .NET development tool for storing and retrieving user secrets outside an application's project files.
- How it is used
- Keeps local-development secrets out of project configuration while making them available to the application.
- How deep it goes
- Shows initialization, storing values, and retrieving a connection string through configuration, while deferring container secret exposure.
- Examples
- Uses a Catalog connection string and Azure AD client and tenant IDs as stored values.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure Secret Manager by initializing a project, setting named values, and reading a connection string through configuration.
Read how .NET in Action, Second Edition explains secret management →
Infrastructure as Code, Patterns and Practices: With examples in Python and Terraform
A secrets manager is a system for securely storing, controlling access to, and rotating sensitive credentials such as passwords.
- How it is used
- Separates credential storage and rotation from infrastructure configuration and delivery pipelines.
- How deep it goes
- Explains storage, variable passing, rotation, and pipeline exposure, but stops short of naming a specific product implementation.
- Examples
- Uses expiring load-balancer certificates, database passwords, API credentials, private keys, and pipeline logs as operational examples.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure IaC and delivery pipelines without hardcoding, exposing, or manually embedding sensitive credentials.
Related concepts
- cryptographic keyused by · A cryptographic key is a value supplied to a cryptographic algorithm to control operations such as encryption, decryption, signing, authentication, or verification.
- moduleused by · A module is a distinct, bounded software unit that groups related code or functionality and provides an organizational or interaction boundary within a larger system.
- encryption at restused by · Encryption at rest is the protection of stored data by encrypting it so it cannot be read without the appropriate cryptographic key.
- deployment pipelineused by · A sequence of automated or manual stages that builds, tests or validates, packages, and delivers software or models toward deployment.
- User Secretsused by · User Secrets is a development-time configuration feature that stores sensitive application settings outside project files and source-control repositories.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.