Your DevOps team would like to provision VMs in GCP via a CICD pipeline. They would like to integrate Vault to protect the credentials used by the tool. Which secrets engine would you recommend?
The Google Cloud Secrets Engine is the best option for the DevOps team to provision VMs in GCP via a CICD pipeline and integrate Vault to protect the credentials used by the tool. The Google Cloud Secrets Engine can dynamically generate GCP service account keys or OAuth tokens based on IAM policies, which can be used to authenticate and authorize the CICD tool to access GCP resources. The credentials are automatically revoked when they are no longer used or when the lease expires, ensuring that the credentials are short-lived and secure. The DevOps team can configure rolesets or static accounts in Vault to define the scope and permissions of the credentials, and use the Vault API or CLI to request credentials on demand. The Google Cloud Secrets Engine also supports generating access tokens for impersonated service accounts,which can be useful for delegating access to other service accounts without storing or managing their keys1.
The Identity Secrets Engine is not a good option for this use case, because it does not generate GCP credentials, but rather generates identity tokens that can be used to access other Vault secrets engines or namespaces2. The Key/Value Secrets Engine version 2 is also not a good option, because it does not generate dynamic credentials, but rather stores and manages static secrets that the user provides3. The SSH Secrets Engine is not a good option either, because it does not generate GCP credentials, but rather generates SSH keys or OTPs that can be used to access remote hosts via SSH4.
References:
Google Cloud - Secrets Engines | Vault | HashiCorp Developer
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