In AWS, we have two secret management services known as AWS Systems Manager and AWS Secrets Manager which have different purposes when it comes to managing and storing sensitive information.

AWS Systems Manager:

• AWS Systems Manager is a versatile service that helps us manage and automate operational tasks on our AWS resources. It offers a wide range of capabilities, including patch management, automation, parameter storage, and more.

• We can use AWS Systems Manager's Parameter Store to store configuration data, secrets, and other information as key-value pairs.

• It's a good choice if we need to store configuration data, environment variables, or any non-sensitive information that we want to manage centrally. Systems Manager Parameter Store provides a hierarchical structure for organizing and managing parameters.

AWS Secrets Manager:

• AWS Secrets Manager is a service specifically designed for the secure storage and management of sensitive information like API keys, database credentials, passwords, and other secrets.

• It provides rotation and auditing features, which make it particularly suitable for secrets that need to be changed regularly for security reasons.

• Secrets Manager can also integrate with other AWS services to automatically rotate credentials and manage their lifecycle.

Secret Manager is more secure and provides various functions than System Manager but is high in cost so we should properly define what sort of data should be stored in which service. For eg, we can store the Docker username, register in the system manager, and the password of the database and other high confidential in the secret manager providing better security also the rotating feature makes it more reliable.

We also have the HashiCorp Vault which is a popular open-source tool designed especially for secret management, unlike the AWS secret management, it is not limited to only the AWS environment.

HashiCorp Vault is more versatile and can be used across multiple cloud providers and on-premises systems.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the choice between AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Systems Manager, and HashiCorp Vault for storing and managing sensitive information depends on the specific needs of our environment and infrastructure.