Overview aws-vault is a tool for storing your AWS credentials in your system keychain instead of as a plain text file on-disk. Credentials and other secrets (including your various system passwords) are stored inside your system keychain. They are encrypted, and cannot easily be stolen by a rogue script or application. By keeping your AWS credentials in your system keychain, they are available to you when you are logged in, unavailable when you are logged out, and provide an important layer of security that the standard plain text storage method does not.

Only a tiny fraction of the code your application runs was written by you or your team. How do you know you can trust the code that was written by other people? Where would you even start? This piece is part of a larger series on Engineering for Site Reliability, specifically balancing stability against the edge of technology. What do I mean by “trust”? Movies and TV shows have given us a version of trust which essentially boils down to “Do you trust me?