Secrets Management

Secrets management is the discipline of storing, distributing, rotating, and auditing sensitive credentials — API keys, database passwords, signing keys, tokens — so they never end up hard-coded in source or leaked in logs. Instead of committing keys to the repo or pasting them in a .env that gets shared over Slack, secrets live in a dedicated system (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Doppler, 1Password, or your platform's encrypted environment settings) that injects them at runtime and controls who can read them. Good secrets management enables rotation (change a leaked key everywhere without a redeploy), least-privilege access, and an audit trail of who accessed what. For AI/SaaS builders this is foundational security: a single API key committed to a public GitHub repo can drain a cloud account or an LLM budget within minutes, since bots scan for exactly that. Practical note: never commit secrets, scan your history for ones already leaked, and treat rotation as routine — assume any secret that's existed long enough has been exposed somewhere.