Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

131–140 of 150 posts

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

#131

You have to give Doppler your secrets which is absolutely crazy. Is there a self hosted version? How does it fair against Vault? Vault is self hosted and open source. Does everyone in this thread know the founder or something? No one is asking these and they're in my view the absolutely most important questions.

It does seem like astroturfing is going on here. It wouldn't be the first time that a YC-backed startup has done so on HN.

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

#132

What are your thoughts on Secrethub? https://secrethub.io

We love seeing other companies innovate to make managing secrets less painful. We have found that most developers really want a holistic way to manage secrets. One stark difference between Doppler and SecretHub is that we have a dashboard that makes it super easy to manage your secrets. We have a deep rooted focus on user experience.

Founder of SecretHub here, big kudos on the GUI Doppler made, looks amazing.

Aside from a feature-by-feature comparison, I feel that both SecretHub and Doppler do a great job of:

1) making secrets management simple enough so any engineer can use it with limited overhead.

2) making secrets management work throughout your entire stack – from development to production – and not just inside one ecosystem.

Finally, we see a trade-off between usability and security being made. At SecretHub, we feel end-to-end encryption is a must for any managed service handling passwords, API keys and other secrets.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just thinking out loud.. isn't it a better solution if you implement e2e encryption with dashboard and cli like how password managers do? i mean it's secrets and as a company you also wouldn't want to get into any trouble. if user losses the password he can always disable old keys of respective services and generate new ones.

Totally agree with this. I'd love a hosted solution for secret management, but e2e encryption seems like an absolute necessity.

If e2e encryption is a requirement for you, consider checking out https://secrethub.io

Full disclosure: I'm the founder :)

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

#134

You have to give Doppler your secrets which is absolutely crazy. Is there a self hosted version? How does it fair against Vault? Vault is self hosted and open source. Does everyone in this thread know the founder or something? No one is asking these and they're in my view the absolutely most important questions.

Yes, for secrets storage it either needs to be e2e encrypted, or self-hosted. E2e partly to protect against internal employee theft, and partly to protect against Doppler’s db getting pwned by malicious hackers, as is so common these days. Storing secrets in the cloud unencrypted is kinda crazy these days.

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

#135

You have to give Doppler your secrets which is absolutely crazy. Is there a self hosted version? How does it fair against Vault? Vault is self hosted and open source. Does everyone in this thread know the founder or something? No one is asking these and they're in my view the absolutely most important questions.

I had the same response. In fact, I assumed that there must be some kind of client-side secret wrapping with a customer-managed key or similar (i.e. you end up managing one secret, rather than n). I still need to secure access to the Doppler API key in any case.

Then I looked at the API documentation and it seems, no, you're being encouraged to send your secrets verbatim over the Internet.

I understand how this invites comparisons with the CSP secrets management products (e.g. AWS Secrets Manager), but it seems strictly worse from a number of perspectives:

* blast radius: if I'm a multi-cloud, or hybrid-cloud, property then compromise of one environment doesn't necessarily lead to compromise of the others; if I have all my eggs in one basket, like Doppler, then it seems like it does.

* Internet traversal: if I'm using something like AWS Secrets Manager from within AWS, I can entirely avoid having to traverse the Internet for my secrets by using VPC endpoints. Having to cross the Internet just means I'm exposed to more bad actors, an increased variety of attacks and also operational risk factors unrelated to security.

* (probable/possible?) segregation of duties concerns: the design of products like AWS Secrets Manager means that some kind of active collusion across product teams within AWS is required to create inappropriate disclosures and to conceal that disclosure. If secrets management is the only product line, that seems less likely to be sustainable.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like this https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/integrations/vault-integrat... It's incredibly simple, and a breeze to use. ``` job "vault" { group "demo" { task "task" { vault { policies = ["database"] } template { env = true data = edit: thanks HN formatting

with this setup, Vault will create a new database user based on the configuration you set (read-only for some services, for example), and will attach a time-to-live to those credentials; as long as the application is using them, it will renew the TTL. When an application is killed, or scaling happens, etc, and the application instance isn't using those specific credentials, Vault will clean up and remove the unused a…

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing, I had no idea this was possible.

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

#137
Checked this out and to be honest I'm completely stoked. We've been looking for a solution to our secrets nightmare and this just might be it.

Question, is it possible to rename the default local environment to "local"? dev means something else at our place ...

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

#138

I could not find anything about Terraform integration. That is something I bet many of your customers will need.

We're also building on Terraform so this kind of integration would be neat! How well are GitHub Actions supported? We've been dancing with secrets there too.

We fully support GitHub Actions and have a native GitHub Action[0] that you can use to install our CLI.

[0] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/install-doppler-cli

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

#139

You have to give Doppler your secrets which is absolutely crazy. Is there a self hosted version? How does it fair against Vault? Vault is self hosted and open source. Does everyone in this thread know the founder or something? No one is asking these and they're in my view the absolutely most important questions.

We realize that storing secrets requires trust and for some companies it may be outside of their comfort zone at the moment. We are currently focused on creating a super easy to use solution. An analogy: there are open source versions of Dropbox for users that don't trust Dropbox with their files (NextCloud, ownCloud, etc.), however this comes with the friction of having to host your own solution. We are more like Dr…

Thank you for acknowledging the need for trust, self-hosting + auditability.

However, please stop trying to contrast yourself with these analogies. Owncloud and Nextcloud both have hosted OR on-prem versions

https://owncloud.com/pricing/

https://nextcloud.com/providers/

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're also building on Terraform so this kind of integration would be neat! How well are GitHub Actions supported? We've been dancing with secrets there too.

We fully support GitHub Actions and have a native GitHub Action[0] that you can use to install our CLI. [0] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/install-doppler-cli

Perfect! Will check it out.
Post reply on HN