Getting started with Hasicorp Vault namespaces - 6 things to know

When it comes to working with namespaces in HashiCorp Vault, there are a few best practices you can follow to effectively manage and organize your secrets. Here are some examples:

1. Logical Separation: Create namespaces to logically separate different environments, projects, or teams within your organization. For example, you can create namespaces like "dev," "staging," and "prod" to separate development, staging, and production environments.

2. Access Control: Define fine-grained access controls for each namespace to ensure that only authorized users or teams can access and manage secrets within that namespace. This helps enforce the principle of least privilege. For example, you can grant read and write access to the "dev" namespace to the development team and read-only access to the "prod" namespace to the operations team.

3. Resource Naming Conventions: Follow consistent naming conventions for namespaces to maintain clarity and consistency. Use descriptive names that reflect the purpose or owner of the namespace. For example, you can use a naming convention like "<team>-<environment>" (e.g., "marketing-dev" or "finance-prod").

4. Namespace Policies: Utilize Vault policies to define fine-grained permissions for namespaces. This allows you to control which operations can be performed within a namespace, such as read, write, delete, or manage. Define policies based on the specific requirements and responsibilities of each team or environment.

5. Namespace Quotas: Set quotas for each namespace to manage resource allocation and prevent any single namespace from consuming excessive resources. Quotas can be defined based on factors like the number of secrets, secret versions, or resource usage.

6. Periodic Review: Regularly review and audit the namespaces and their associated policies and permissions. Ensure that namespaces are still needed, access controls are up to date, and there are no misconfigurations or security vulnerabilities.

Remember, these are general best practices for working with namespaces in HashiCorp Vault. The specific implementation may vary based on your organization's requirements and the complexity of your environment.