When comparing Ansible Vault vs Keywhiz, the Slant community recommends Ansible Vault for most people. In the question“What are the best shared secret managers?” Ansible Vault is ranked 1st while Keywhiz is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Ansible Vault is:
The official documentation of Ansible vault does a great job at explaining how Ansible Vault works and how to use the easy UI for encrypting, decrypting, and re-keying your secrets for storing in source control.
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Pros
Pro The documentation does a good job on explaining how to use it
The official documentation of Ansible vault does a great job at explaining how Ansible Vault works and how to use the easy UI for encrypting, decrypting, and re-keying your secrets for storing in source control.
Pro Allows keeping encrypted data in ansible playbooks easily
Ansible uses configuration files called playbooks which are used to describe a policy that the remote system needs to follow. Though there is often a need to keep data from these configurations files encrypted when using source control.
Doing this in Ansible's Vault is pretty easy, simply running: ansible-playbook site.yml --ask-vault-pass
will run a playbook which uses encrypted data.
Pro Versioning support
Keywhiz supports versioning secrets through its admin UI or CLI utilities.
Cons
Con No way of exposing just the key in the key-value pair
Ansible vault files are encrypted YAML key-value stores. The entire file is encrypted, and so it's impossible to indicate which keys are defined within the vault without also viewing values.
Con Still in alpha stage
Keywhiz is still in a very early stage of its development and may not be ready for production yet since it's prone to changes and may have some security issues.