Terraform is an “Infrastructure as a Code” (IaC) platform by Hashicorp that helps design and deploy virtual or cloud infrastructure using a high-level configuration language. With Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) based configuration templates, Terraform enables building, remodeling, versioning, and reuse of infrastructure components; forming the foundation of a full infrastructure lifecycle.

To maintain security, Terraform supports:

• Plain text secrets by leveraging native environment variables
• Encrypted secrets in a key protected file
• Integration with a secrets management platform like Akeyless Vault

For enhanced security across Terraform configurations, Akeyless Vault administers on-demand access keys instead of using vulnerable plaintext secrets. With the ability to attribute secrets across multiple third-party platforms (AWS, GCP, Private Cloud, etc.) and used within a Terraform instance, Akeyless acts as a consolidated source for provisioning secrets through your infrastructure.

Benefits of Using a Centralized Secrets Management Solution

With a centralized secrets management platform like Akeyless Vault, Terraform secrets are unified and secured further. Embracing such a platform makes it operationally simpler to maintain compliance and generate access usage visibility.

**Operation-wise: **With a secrets management platform like Akeyless Vault, Terraform leverages the benefit of maintaining a remote-state single source of secrets rather than referring multiple keys for third-party platforms within a single instance.

**Audit-wise: **A centralized secrets manager permits a simple amalgamated audit of secrets. Instead of auditing multiple secret repositories, Akeyless acts as thesingle audit channel for all application secrets, thereby ensuring easy audit compliance.

**Functionality-wise: **Similar to other DevOps tools, Terraform lacks the creation of Just-in-Time (JIT) secrets. With JIT secrets, a user can achieve on-demand access to a Terraform state’s resources based on his access privileges. To solve this, Akeyless generates dynamic secrets on-the-fly that expire on their own, thereby achieving a Zero-Trust implementation.

**Security-wise — **Through Akeyless Vault, relevantly scoped and short-lived secrets are generated Just-in-Time, preventing abuse and theft of access privileges.

How to Fetch a Secret with Akeyless Vault in Terraform

The Akeyless Vault leverages the vault provider to provision and fetch secrets on the fly. Let’s proceed with the simple steps involved in fetching secrets from Akeyless Vault into Terraform.

Prerequisites

1- Sign in or create an account with Akeyless (it’s free) by accessing the following URL: https://console.akeyless.io/register

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