AWS Secrets Manager vs Systems Manager Parameter Store
AWS Secrets Manager helps protect secrets needed to access applications, services, and IT resources and can easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.
AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store provides secure, scalable, centralized, hierarchical storage for configuration data and secret management and can store data such as passwords, database strings, etc.
Storage (Limits keep on upgrading)
AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store allows us to store up to
Standard tier – 10,000 parameters, each of which can be up to 4KB
Advanced tier – 100,000 parameters, each of which can be up to 8KB
AWS Secrets Manager will enable us to store up to 40,000 parameters, each of which can be up to 64kb.
Encryption
Encryption is optional for Systems Parameter Store
Encryption is mandatory for Secrets Manager and you cannot opt out.
Automated Secret Rotation
System Parameter Store does not support out-of-the-box secrets rotation.
AWS Secrets Manager enables database credential rotation on a schedule.
Cross-account Access
System Parameter Store does not support cross-account access
AWS Secrets Manager supports resource-based IAM policies that grant cross-account access.
Cost (keeps on changing)
Secrets Manager is comparatively costlier than the System Parameter store.
AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store comes with no additional cost for the Standard tier.
AWS Secrets Manager costs $0.40 per secret per month, and data retrieval costs $0.05 per 10,000 API calls.
AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions
Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
A company uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL databases for its data tier. The company must implement password rotation for the databases. Which solution meets this requirement with the LEAST operational overhead?
Store the password in AWS Secrets Manager. Enable automatic rotation on the secret.
Store the password in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. Enable automatic rotation on the parameter.
Store the password in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. Write an AWS Lambda function that rotates the password.
Store the password in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Enable automatic rotation on the customer master key (CMK).
