Azure Key Vault vs AWS Secrets Manager: Managed Identity, IRSA, and Cloud-Native Secret Management
This article compares Azure Key Vault and AWS Secrets Manager, focusing on how they handle secret management for cloud-native applications. It explains the 'Secret Zero' problem, where applications need an initial credential to retrieve secrets, and how cloud providers address this by using workload identities instead of long-lived credentials. Azure uses Managed Identity and Entra ID, while AWS utilizes IAM roles, IRSA, and EKS Pod Identity. The piece also touches on rotation patterns, private networking, and compares these cloud-native solutions to HashiCorp Vault for multi-cloud scenarios. AI
