Managing your secrets well is imperative in software development. It's not just about avoiding hardcoding secrets into your code, your CI/CD configurations, and more. It's about implementing tools and practices that make good secrets management almost second nature.
A Quick Overview of Secrets Management
What is a secret? It's any bit of code, text, or binary data that provides access to a resource or data that should have restricted access. Almost every software development process involves secrets: credentials for your developers to access your version control system (VCS) like GitHub, credentials for a microservice to access a database, and credentials for your CI/CD system to push new artifacts to production.