| 27 May 2022 |
 Mic92 (Old) | In reply to @grahamc:nixos.org
Mic92: ^ Let's say something cloud-vendor neutral. I need to be able to migrate if possible. | 13:25:26 |
 @grahamc:nixos.org | I'd use whatever auto auth method you can built-in to vault, trying to remain vendor neutral on that is (imho) missing out on a lot of really good security engineering | 13:26:34 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | ie: AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. all have built-in automatic authentication mechanisms that I'd take advantage of | 13:27:13 |
| Mic92 (Old) | Do you usually deploy vault enterprise? | 13:27:24 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | no | 13:27:36 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | I don't have that kind of budget 😓 | 13:27:53 |
| Mic92 (Old) | Ok. How do you manage TLS? I just bootstrapped something with cfssl for now | 13:29:11 |
| Mic92 (Old) | And also how do you unseal? | 13:29:18 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | letsencrypt | 13:29:20 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/autounseal-aws-kms | 13:29:50 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | this is how we generally integrate vault with our services: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nixos-vault-service | 13:30:04 |
| Mic92 (Old) | Ah, I thought aws kms unseal is only available in the enterprise edition | 13:30:35 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | nope | 13:30:40 |
| Mic92 (Old) | Which is why I did not use it | 13:30:43 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | kms unseal + dynamodb as the backend | 13:31:03 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | makes it relatively easy to deploy using AMIs and not permit SSH access to the vault hosts | 13:31:25 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | (which is considered best practice for vault servers) | 13:31:58 |
| Mic92 (Old) | So to update your fault server, you have to upload a new AMI? | 13:33:50 |
| Mic92 (Old) | *vault | 13:33:54 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | that is the recommended best-practice for managing Vault servers, yeah | 13:34:05 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/production-hardening | 13:34:41 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | "Disable ssh" and "immutable upgrades" | 13:35:39 |
| Mic92 (Old) | I see. Also one can run multiple vault servers on the same dynamo backend, right? https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/configuration/storage/dynamodb | 13:36:46 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | as long as you setup clustering | 13:36:56 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | I'd recommend spending a few days to a week playing with vault, setting up a lab, doing clustering, failovers, seal / unseal / etc. | 13:37:21 |
| Mic92 (Old) | I probably won't for now. I would be interested if I later on can migrate to such a setup, if required. | 13:38:04 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | if you're not going to run multiple vault servers then I would probably recommend either using HCP Vault, or recommend against using vault | 13:38:40 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | it tends to quickly become an incredibly important cornerstone to infrastructure and it can be somewhat catastrophic if it goes down | 13:39:08 |
| Mic92 (Old) | Ok. So I thought that short downtimes can be handled because vault agent is also caching stuff? | 13:40:10 |
| @grahamc:nixos.org | the vault agent caches some stuff but not everything | 13:40:29 |
