Managing Application Secrets Like a Pro Using Google Secret Manager

Ramesh Lingappan
The Startup
Published in
6 min readApr 4, 2020

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Google Secret Manager — accessing secrets using spring boot

At the beginning of last year, I wrote an article titled How to secure and manage secrets using Google Cloud KMS, explaining how we can use Google Cloud KMS (Key Management System) to encrypt secrets and securely use it in our applications.

I mentioned it is a decent approach because of the lack of support for good secret management solutions within the Google cloud ecosystem. It is kind of, a hacky way to get the job done, because,

  • it requires a lot of code setup
  • had to keep the encrypted version within version control
  • no easy way to manage these secrets (like a console UI)

Finally, there is now an easier & better a solution, Google has announced their secret management solution Google Secret Manager.

Huge shout-out to Google Cloud and their team behind this solution.

Secret Manager is a secure and convenient storage system for API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data. Secret Manager provides a…

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