As apps become more complex in the way they use microservices, managing API keys and other secrets becomes more challenging as well. Microservices running in containers need to transfer secrets to allow them to communicate with each other. Each of those transfers, and each of the secrets being exchanged, needs to be secured properly for the entire system to remain secure.
Hard-coding API keys and other secrets is definitely NOT an option. Despite the obvious nature of the previous statement, a lot of developers still expose the credentials of their microservices or apps on GitHub. Fortunately, there are tools designed to make managing secrets easier. We are going to compare the best secrets management tools in this article.
