chamber VS sops

Chamber takes an opinionated view on AWS Parameter store as compared to ssmsh

Building on this I’ve found https://github.com/segmentio/chamber to be super useful

For secrets, the PaaS platform (Github Actions, Fly.io, etc.) I usually use has a method that works with environment variables. If I need something custom on AWS, then I use Chamber backed by AWS KMS.

We use Chamber (https://github.com/segmentio/chamber) to do this for us. Bring it into your image and use the environment variables as necessary. Some applications support using environment variables natively, you might need to add a script to write them into your config files.

You can take a look at some code I wrote a while back to do this if you want examples https://github.com/segmentio/chamber/blob/master/store/ssmstore.go .

We use AWS Parameter Store and segmentio/chamber.

https://github.com/segmentio/chamber is nice with parameter store, ive used it in the past.

Use Chamber.

For interacting with SSM, I would recommend using https://github.com/segmentio/chamber. You could add something to your user-data script that uses chamber to load a config file (chamber export is one way to do it) from SSM on startup. You could also use Systems Manager to enable you to do a "hot reload" of sorts by sending a command to your server to run the chamber command and restart your application.

My script just sets up default .sops.yaml for https://github.com/getsops/sops

You can further edit .sops.yaml(eg have multiple of them) and decide how you split secrets in your directory tree to further customize who can decrypt the secrets.

It works pretty well for prod/dev splits, etc

Mozilla SOPS (Secrets OPerationS) is an open-source command-line tool for managing and storing secrets. It uses secure encryption methods to encrypt secrets at rest and decrypt them at runtime. SOPS supports a variety of key management systems, including AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, and PGP. It's particularly useful in a DevOps context where sensitive data like API keys, passwords, or certificates need to be securely managed and seamlessly integrated into application workflows.

Encrypted secrets thanks to SOPS and Age

We do the exact same thing to keep track of some credentials we use sops[1] and AWS KMS to separate credentials by sensitivity, then use the git differ to view the diffs between the encrypted secrets

Definitely not best practice security-wise, but it works well

[1] https://github.com/getsops/sops

For anyone new to SOPS like I was - https://github.com/getsops/sops

I've found this is largely solved by strictly separating plain config and secrets, and then having secrets pull from GCP secret manager / vault / whatever.

You can then commit all the config (including the secret identifiers) and it all just works so long as you're authenticated with your secret storage system.

We do this for the live configuration as well in line with Gitops and find it to work well.

If you don't want to use a cloud secret manager you can also use something like https://github.com/getsops/sops to commit the encrypted secrets safely

Basically, the simpler the better --just encrypt your secrets and check them in to version control.

We use SOPS[0] for this, and have found it to be pretty nice.

[0]: https://github.com/getsops/sops

The answer is that secrets shouldn't be stored in the git repo at all, but somewhere safe like a password manager or Mozilla's SOPS which people seem to love.

Unfortunately, the SOPS project is in some sort of a limbo state and there has been quite a long period with limited maintenance and unclear position from Mozilla. Despite the project being accepted into the CNCF, it's still unclear what will happen with it going forward.