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Small company owner here (5 devs, no dedicated devops or ops people). It is a pain. We manage secrets with Ansible and Ansible Vault. When a key needs changing

Small company owner here (5 devs, no dedicated devops or ops people). It is a pain. We manage secrets with Ansible and Ansible Vault. When a key needs changing the process is very annoying. But at this point I never thought of it as a problem I would pay money for because it is still not painful enough. Things would likely change if my company gets bigger, let’s say > 15 devs. Everybody can deploy the ansible playbooks right now but if the company gets bigger then I will have to worry about access control for different people. I may also have dedicated devops/ops people in which case I will want to limit normal developers’ access. I will worry about whether there is a process in place to ensure that keys always stay safe and are rotated whenever an employees leaves. etcetera. Your product reminds me a lot of Launchdarkly, in that it solves a seemingly trivial problem (they help you manage feature flags), yet when you think of it in the context of a larger organization where people have to work together then there are suddenly lots of related problems that aren’t so trivially solved. Launchdarkly apparently managed to convince VCs to invest in them. You may want to look at them for inspiration. They have material posted on Heavybit.

0xmohit 9y ago
Have you considered using Hashicorp Vault [1] or sops [2]? [1] https://www.vaultproject.io/ https://www.vaultproject.io/ [2] https://github.com/mozilla/sops/ https://github.com/mozilla/sops/
- FooBarWidget 9y ago
  I have looked at Vault but I have found integrating it with frameworks to be more challenging than I would like. There appears to be very few resouurces besides the official docs. Last time I checked it was not very clear how I would integrate it with Rails. Haven't tried sops, thanks for the link.
danenania 9y ago
Thanks for laying out your thought process. I definitely see your point about it being an issue that gets much more painful as you grow. We do have a decent number of smaller teams using EnvKey so far, but my sense is that most were not replacing an Ansible/Ansible Vault-like setup, but instead saw it as a simple way to put any form of secrets management in place. The comparison to LaunchDarkly is interesting. When first hearing about the idea of a feature flagging service, I do remember thinking "why does anyone need a service for this?" but as you say, the complexity grows very quickly. I'm hoping to convince smaller teams that it's worthwhile for them to spend a few minutes and a few dollars up front to make secrets and configuration an area that is secure and 'just works' so they never have to worry about it again, but it's probably true that larger teams are a more natural fit.

0xmohit 9y ago

Have you considered using Hashicorp Vault [1] or sops [2]? [1] https://www.vaultproject.io/ https://www.vaultproject.io/ [2] https://github.com/mozilla/sops/ https://github.com/mozilla/sops/

FooBarWidget 9y ago
I have looked at Vault but I have found integrating it with frameworks to be more challenging than I would like. There appears to be very few resouurces besides the official docs. Last time I checked it was not very clear how I would integrate it with Rails. Haven't tried sops, thanks for the link.

danenania 9y ago

Thanks for laying out your thought process. I definitely see your point about it being an issue that gets much more painful as you grow. We do have a decent number of smaller teams using EnvKey so far, but my sense is that most were not replacing an Ansible/Ansible Vault-like setup, but instead saw it as a simple way to put any form of secrets management in place. The comparison to LaunchDarkly is interesting. When first hearing about the idea of a feature flagging service, I do remember thinking "why does anyone need a service for this?" but as you say, the complexity grows very quickly. I'm hoping to convince smaller teams that it's worthwhile for them to spend a few minutes and a few dollars up front to make secrets and configuration an area that is secure and 'just works' so they never have to worry about it again, but it's probably true that larger teams are a more natural fit.