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Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

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21–30 of 150 posts

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two immediate reasons. The first is so that you can manage your secrets and env vars in the same way in development as you do in production. Engineers focus a lot on doing this for code, but this hasn't hit the env var space yet. The second is so that all your secrets live in one place. Doppler is your source of truth for secrets in the same way that GitHub is your source of truth for your code. Your develo…

But the [Secret Manger]( https://cloud.google.com/secret-manager ) from google is also easy to use and specially firebase environment config is exactly like the demo. Best wishes ...

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#22

Congrats on the launch! This space is definitely evolving with how many environment configs and creds teams have to maintain for all their environments and services. I’m only familiar with Secrets Manager and Parameter Store and will check this out. Unfortunately, our customers are not going to be early adopters of this service but if it does the job well, this is something I can try and recommend them in future.

Your point about not being an early adopter is well taken. We fully expect a segment of the market will be disinterested in using a relatively new product like ours. If we were a customer considering a new secrets manager, we would likely weigh similar concerns. I think the onus is on us to prove to these larger customers over time that we can be trusted (from a security/availability/longevity standpoint) and we certainly intend to do so.

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two immediate reasons. The first is so that you can manage your secrets and env vars in the same way in development as you do in production. Engineers focus a lot on doing this for code, but this hasn't hit the env var space yet. The second is so that all your secrets live in one place. Doppler is your source of truth for secrets in the same way that GitHub is your source of truth for your code. Your develo…

But the [Secret Manger]( https://cloud.google.com/secret-manager ) from google is also easy to use and specially firebase environment config is exactly like the demo. Best wishes ...

We don't think of Secret Manager as a competitor, but more of a destination for your secrets. We have integrations with both AWS and GCP Secrets Manager so you can write directly to them from Doppler.

We also can write to AWS Parameter Store.

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vault is definitely much more of a beast, but it also does a lot more, such as dynamic credentials. For just storing static secret/env vars this seems like a simpler solution.

Great point about dynamic secrets. This is an area we currently don't address, but it is definitely on our roadmap. There is a segment of the market for which dynamic secrets are an absolute requirement and we fully acknowledge that.

Just out of curiosity - what do people use dynamic secrets for? What is a "dynamic" secret anyway?

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#27
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two immediate reasons. The first is so that you can manage your secrets and env vars in the same way in development as you do in production. Engineers focus a lot on doing this for code, but this hasn't hit the env var space yet. The second is so that all your secrets live in one place. Doppler is your source of truth for secrets in the same way that GitHub is your source of truth for your code. Your develo…

But the [Secret Manger]( https://cloud.google.com/secret-manager ) from google is also easy to use and specially firebase environment config is exactly like the demo. Best wishes ...

Hi this is Ruud, founding engineer at Doppler. You can see us as a single source of truth where it is easy to manage your different projects and environments all in 1 place. GCP Secret Manager is great for production, but becomes harder to manage when you want to use it multiple environments with larger teams and in different projects/micro services.

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#28

Interesting. Couple Q's: - Is this basically the config management that's in Heroku, but it's possible to use with anything else? - Any plans for open source? I think that's a big reason why people use Vault, or roll their own.

- Kind of. It's more a GitHub for secrets. A central place to store all of your secrets organized by projects and environments. From there you can setup auto-sync with a bunch of destinations like Heroku or AWS Parameter Store.

- Our CLI is open source. No plans to open source the core product but have debated it internally.

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#29
post #24

Looks great! What happens if Doppler is down or if there is a SNAFU when syncing the env in production?

Great question! We address this in detail on our Security page [0], but I'm happy to give a high-level overview here:

1. Don't go down! We run two independent compute clusters on different managed infrastructure products (GKE and GAE) and route between them at the DNS layer to help avoid downtime

2. We store local encrypted fallback files on your infra via our CLI [1]. These local fallback files are fully managed and allow the CLI to continue to serve your secrets, even if our API or your internet connection is down. I use this heavily whenever I'm on a flight

3. More coming soon! (really)

[0] https://docs.doppler.com/docs/security-fact-sheet

[1] https://github.com/DopplerHQ/cli

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#30

Congrats on the launch. Great to see more products in this space. I'm also familiar (but never used) Envkey, which I think might also be from the YC alumni? but I'm not sure... Shameless plug: I created an open-source tool called envwarden[0], which is really just a simple wrapper around the Bitwarden[1] CLI (also open-source). envwarden helps you manage your server secrets and other variables inside your Bitwarden p…

EnvKey user here - it looks exactly like EnvKey. Not sure what the underlying crypto primitives are - EnvKey relies on PGP/GPG style stuff and have a lot of documentation about it.
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