This is a submission for the Amazon Q Developer "Quack The Code" Challenge: Exploring the Possibilities What I Built At my company, we still don’t have a proper tool to manage secrets. So, naturally, people come up with their own solutions—some of them not very secure. I had the idea of using AWS Secrets Manager as a secure place to store our secrets. But there was a challenge: We didn’t want to create a separate secret for every single thing. Some secrets might never even be used, and at $0.40 per secret, that adds up quickly. Then I discovered that a single AWS Secret can store up to 64KB, which is more than enough for a bunch of simple strings. That got me thinking... What if I could build a secret manager using just one AWS Secret? So I did it! :) Introducing aws-vault-lite — a lightweight secret manager I built in just one night (with a hand from Amazon Q). What is? The Single Secret Design (SSD) is a cost-effective and flexible strategy for managing secrets in AWS Secrets Manager. Instead of creating individual secrets for every credential or config item, SSD consolidates all secrets for a single department (e.g., CloudOps, Networking, Infra) into one structured JSON secret, significantly reducing monthly costs and improving manageability. That was a pretty polite intro, wasn’t it? But hey, this is going on my GitHub, so I had to make it sound somewhat professional.
This is a submission for the Amazon Q Developer "Quack The Code" Challenge: Exploring the Possibilities
What I Built
At my company, we still don’t have a proper tool to manage secrets. So, naturally, people come up with their own solutions—some of them not very secure.
I had the idea of using AWS Secrets Manager as a secure place to store our secrets. But there was a challenge:
We didn’t want to create a separate secret for every single thing. Some secrets might never even be used, and at $0.40 per secret, that adds up quickly.
Then I discovered that a single AWS Secret can store up to 64KB, which is more than enough for a bunch of simple strings.
That got me thinking...
What if I could build a secret manager using just one AWS Secret?
So I did it! :)
Introducing aws-vault-lite — a lightweight secret manager I built in just one night (with a hand from Amazon Q).
What is?
The Single Secret Design (SSD) is a cost-effective and flexible strategy for managing secrets in AWS Secrets Manager. Instead of creating individual secrets for every credential or config item, SSD consolidates all secrets for a single department (e.g., CloudOps, Networking, Infra) into one structured JSON secret, significantly reducing monthly costs and improving manageability.
That was a pretty polite intro, wasn’t it?
But hey, this is going on my GitHub, so I had to make it sound somewhat professional.
