Secret management is a critical component of any infrastructure. Secrets are sensitive pieces of information that should be protected from unauthorized access. These can include database credentials, API keys, or private IP addresses.

Terraform provides several ways to manage secrets, including environment variables, remote state, and integrations with secret stores like AWS Secrets Manager. As teams develop their infrastructure, they will need to consider how to manage secrets in a secure and scalable way.

In this lab, you will configure an Amazon RDS instance to use credentials stored in AWS Secrets Manager. You will also configure a remote state backend to store the .tfstate file in an Amazon S3 bucket and mask the values of sensitive environment variables.

Learning objectives

Upon completion of this intermediate-level lab, you will be able to:

• Configure an Amazon S3 bucket to store Terraform remote state
• Mask the values of sensitive environment variables in Terraform
• Access a secret stored in AWS Secrets Manager using Terraform

Intended audience

• Individuals studying for the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate exam
• Cloud Engineers
• DevOps Engineers

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

• Terraform Remote State
• AWS Secrets Manager

The following content can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

• Using Terraform Remote State
• Storing and Rotating RDS Credentials in Secrets Manager