Vault Overkill Critical Flaws Unpopular Truths | Generated by AI
I’ll search for some perspectives on HashiCorp Vault that might be less commonly discussed or go against the mainstream consensus.Let me search for more critical perspectives and alternative viewpoints.Let me search for more critical perspectives about complexity and when Vault might be overkill.Based on my research, here are some unpopular or contrarian ideas about HashiCorp Vault:
It’s often overkill for most teams
One critic described Vault as “a glorified key value store with a lot of overkill features you’ll probably never use,” suggesting simpler tools like Mozilla SOPS work better for straightforward use cases. The complexity Vault introduces may not be justified unless you need multiple advanced security features across different platforms.
“Deceptively simple” leads to underestimating operational burden
Despite appearing as a single binary with immediate functionality, Vault is “deceptively simple” and requires extensive strategy and work to implement properly. Teams end up “wrestling with clusters, unseal keys, endless storage backends, and operators quitting at 2 a.m. because Consul went sideways.”
Cloud provider tools are “good enough” for many
If using a cloud provider, tools like GCP Secrets Manager may already handle secrets adequately without needing Vault, especially since they’re fully managed and integrated with the environment. For single-cloud deployments, Vault’s multi-cloud capabilities become unnecessary overhead.
Enterprise pricing doesn’t match the open-source promise
While Vault is technically open source, the Enterprise version is described as “very expensive,” and some users need HSM solutions for PCI compliance, adding another subscription cost. The free version lacks critical features needed for production at scale.
Developer productivity suffers
The additional development effort required by product teams to integrate Vault may consume time and resources that could’ve contributed to building new features to meet product goals and revenue targets. If developers find it too difficult, they may resort to insecure homegrown solutions instead.
License change broke trust
In August 2023, HashiCorp switched from the permissive MPL 2.0 license to the more restrictive Business Source License, leading many organizations to seek alternatives. This undermined the open-source community that had contributed to Vault’s success.
Policy management becomes a security liability
Wildcard policies can create massive security flaws, with one engineer discovering that 15% of their namespaces had unauthorized authentication mounts because overly permissive policies allowed teams to create any auth mount type.
It lacks end-to-end encryption
Despite its security focus, Vault lacks end-to-end encryption, meaning the Vault server has access to all secrets in plaintext, creating a larger attack surface and requiring complete trust in anyone with operational access to the server.
These criticisms don’t necessarily mean Vault is bad—but they suggest it’s best suited for large, complex, multi-cloud organizations rather than the universal solution it’s often positioned as.