AWS secrets manager helps you to secure your company secrets, such as database password and usernames -  which are needed to access your applications and other IT resources.

As a service it allows you to rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API  keys, and other secrets through their lifetime.

Secrets Manager is fully integrated with AWS’  Identity and Access Management (IAM). This allows you to manage access to these secrets with the same level of fidelity you have come to expect from AWS in general.

For example, if you wanted to limit access to production passwords you might have a policy that prevents anyone outside of the corporate network from retrieving that data. However, you might allow your developers access to your development related secrets, when working on the development environment, wherever they are in the world.

Secrets Manager offers the ability to automatically rotate your secrets and passwords for you. Keeping in line with normal 30 and 60-day rotation guidelines that many corporation will have.

This functionality has been integrated with Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DocumentDB.

And the most powerful feature of all is that all these interactions can be implemented as simple API calls. Allowing you to remove the obstacle we had encountered early with our cloud formation template where we had a plaintext password embedded right into the code.

Let's take a look at that template again.

Using AWS secrets manager we can remove the explicit reference to your password by adding a few extra lines of code. In order to do that however, we need to understand how to create a new secret inside Secrets Manager.

Lectures

Course Introduction - Why Automate? - Automating with AWS - Creating a Secret - Putting It All Together - Wrap Up