AWS Certificate Manager vs. HashiCorp Vault

I would always recommend AWS Certificate Manager for anyone using AWS cloud services. The perfect scenario would be with your domain managed by AWS Route 53 as you can obtain auto renewal of certificates with really good security for all your public facing application that uses CloudFront, ALB or API Gateway.

Incentivized

HashiCorp Vault, in my opinion, is a defacto standard for any cloud or automation implementation. They're the best of the best as far as products for secrets management and the ability to use it against relatively any service you have is unheard of for other products. HashiCorp has really taken out all the stops when it comes to creating a nice, extensible tool that people can use to suit their needs.

Incentivized

• Issue, Renew and Validate SSL Certificates.
• Allows us to integrate it with other AWS Services.

• The HTTP API you use to write and read secrets is open and can be used by any application.
• It keeps our sensitive data/credentials out of our GitLab repositories.
• Sealing and unsealing the Vault on demand adds an additional layer of security.

Incentivized

• Sometimes ACM certificates don't work with ELB.
• No automatic alert on certificate expiration.

Incentivized

• Documentation could be better.
• The multiple key unseal process can be a problem if the need arises.
• It would make more sense if HashiCorp Vault combined with HashiCorp Consul to create a unique product.

Incentivized

HashiCorp Vault is the best there is out there, and it has become critical to our secret management use cases. It would be difficult to find anything that would suit our needs better and that would be beneficial for us to switch over to.

Incentivized

AWS historically has had very confusing interfaces. But in recent times they have improved them. AWS Certificate Manager is a clear sample of this. The interface is clear and straightforward, with no useless or cryptic options. Really I can't think of a way the interface could be better with the actual options available.

Incentivized

We spent a little more time than we imagined to conceptually understand how HashiCorp Vault operates, as well as how it is configured. This is not trivial, and keep in mind that you will need to take some time to get a thorough understanding of the tool. The documentation could be more helpful in this regard.

Incentivized

They do a great job.

Incentivized

Hashicorp has been very responsive to our questions and inquiries up to this point. We are currently working on them to develop a more granular permissions model within Vault. We are very close to achieving our objectives with the help of their support team. We do not seem to be in the same time zone which makes it hard for escalated issues.

Incentivized

Easy to implement within a few clicks, or even from command line, the alternatives doesn't integrate that easy with AWS Application Load Balancers or AWS CloudFront

Incentivized

HashiCorp Vault is way better than Azure Key Vault; it has more features and it goes beyond a key-value secret store.

Incentivized

• We're saving our spent on SSL certificates As it dosen't costs at all.
• Limited to AWS only, Certificates issued by ACM can be used with AWS managed services only.
• It doesn't support automatic domain verification with other DNS management systems.

• Helped us reach our security compliance goals.
• Helped us strengthen our security position in our infrastructure by improving on poor secret management practices.

Incentivized