Handling sensitive data in Ansible
It is a known practice not to keep sensitive data in plain text format. The same rule applies to Ansible as well, as you will be dealing with different types of sensitive data in Ansible. The sensitive data could be anything, such as the following:
- System passwords
- API keys
- Port details of applications
- Database passwords
- SSL certificates or keys
- Cloud credentials
We have already learned that Ansible uses plain text format for playbooks, variables, and all other configurations. Hence, storing sensitive data in normal variable files is not desirable and we need to store such information using a more secure method.
Before we jump into the details of Ansible Vault, let us learn about some of the alternative secret management methods in the following sections.
Integrating with Vault services
One of the most common methods for storing sensitive information is using key vault software and services where we can...
