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Amazon Secrets Manager

Amazon Secrets Manager

Easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets through their lifecycle

Get started with Amazon Secrets Manager

Overview

Amazon Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. The service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. Users and applications retrieve secrets with a call to Secrets Manager APIs, eliminating the need to hardcode sensitive information in plain text. Secrets Manager offers secret rotation with built-in integration for Amazon RDS, and Amazon Redshift. Also, the service is extensible to other types of secrets, including API keys and OAuth tokens. In addition, Secrets Manager enables you to control access to secrets using fine-grained permissions and audit secret rotation centrally for resources in the Amazon Cloud, third-party services, and on-premises.

Benefits

Rotate secrets safely

Amazon Secrets Manager helps you meet your security and compliance requirements by enabling you to rotate secrets safely without the need for code deployments. For example, Secrets Manager offers built-in integration for Amazon RDS, and Amazon Redshift and rotates these database credentials on your behalf automatically. You can customize Lambda functions to extend Secrets Manager rotation to other secret types, such as API keys and OAuth tokens. Retrieving the secret from Secrets Manager ensures that developers and applications are using the latest version of your secrets.

Manage access with fine-grained policies

With Secrets Manager, you can manage access to secrets using fine-grained Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and resource-based policies. For example, you can create a policy that enables developers to retrieve certain secrets only when they are used for the development environment. The same policy could enable developers to retrieve passwords used in the production environment only if their requests are coming from within the corporate IT network. For the database administrator, a policy can be built to allow the database administrator to manage all database credentials and permission to read the SSH keys required to perform OS-level changes to the particular instance hosting the database.

Secure and audit secrets centrally

Using Secrets Manager, you can help secure secrets by encrypting them with encryption keys that you manage using Amazon Key Management Service (KMS). It also integrates with Amazon Web Services’ logging and monitoring services for centralized auditing. For example, you can audit Amazon CloudTrail logs to see when Secrets Manager rotates a secret or configure Amazon CloudWatch Events to notify you when an administrator deletes a secret.

Pay as you go

Secrets Manager offers pay as you go pricing. You pay for the number of secrets managed in Secrets Manager and the number of Secrets Manager API calls made. Using Secrets Manager, you can enable a highly available secrets management service without the upfront investment and on-going maintenance costs of operating your own infrastructure.