I was curious if Infisical would eventually turn into Vault (i.e., move beyond pure secret management), and this appears to be the first step in that direction. Granted, the onboarding/usage steps in the article are dramatically simplified compared to Vault.
We used to use a method that was identical to this using Vault. Even wrote our own mini-CLI with a similar usage pattern. However, nowadays, we rely on Tailscale SSH (with a break-glass key) and have never really felt the need for an alternative.
You're right in noticing that we're moving beyond secrets management into adjacent related verticals as well, specifically branching out more into the larger identity and access management space; secrets management continues to be the bread and butter of Infisical but the way we see it, it would be super nice in the long run to have one unified control plane over all related aspects spanning secrets management to certificate management, SSH access, and more.
One of the core product philosophies of Infisical has always been to abstract away complexity as much as possible while still giving users the ability to customize the tool.
Whereas Vault might, for example, have you explicitly create SSH certificate authorities and require 12+ steps to configure a working SSH certificate-based authentication model, Infisical SSH makes it so you only have to care about users and hosts that is who has access to what with something like 4 steps and if you want more power out of Infisical then that is always possible to build atop.
Comments
I was curious if Infisical would eventually turn into Vault (i.e., move beyond pure secret management), and this appears to be the first step in that direction. Granted, the onboarding/usage steps in the article are dramatically simplified compared to Vault.
We used to use a method that was identical to this using Vault. Even wrote our own mini-CLI with a similar usage pattern. However, nowadays, we rely on Tailscale SSH (with a break-glass key) and have never really felt the need for an alternative.
Co-founder of Infisical here!
You're right in noticing that we're moving beyond secrets management into adjacent related verticals as well, specifically branching out more into the larger identity and access management space; secrets management continues to be the bread and butter of Infisical but the way we see it, it would be super nice in the long run to have one unified control plane over all related aspects spanning secrets management to certificate management, SSH access, and more.
One of the core product philosophies of Infisical has always been to abstract away complexity as much as possible while still giving users the ability to customize the tool.
Whereas Vault might, for example, have you explicitly create SSH certificate authorities and require 12+ steps to configure a working SSH certificate-based authentication model, Infisical SSH makes it so you only have to care about users and hosts that is who has access to what with something like 4 steps and if you want more power out of Infisical then that is always possible to build atop.
Good to know regarding Tailscale SSH!