Updated October 25, 2026
· ~2 min read
HashiCorp moved Vault to the Business Source License in August 2023, and IBM completed its acquisition of HashiCorp in February 2025. The licence has not changed back. OpenBao, forked from the last MPL-licensed Vault release and now an OpenSSF project, ships regularly, 2.6.0 in July 2026, and has picked up significant adopters.
On AWS most teams never needed Vault at all: Secrets Manager stores and rotates secrets, Parameter Store holds configuration for free at standard tier, and IAM decides who reads what. On Kubernetes, the External Secrets Operator syncs from any of them into native Secrets.
Short-lived, per-request database credentials across many systems; an internal certificate authority issuing certificates to thousands of services; encryption as a service so applications never hold keys; one secrets control plane across AWS, other clouds and data centres. If none of these describe you, running a highly available secrets cluster — with unseal keys, upgrades and its own disaster recovery — is a lot of operational weight to carry for something AWS does for a few dollars a month.
Question 1 of 2
Are your workloads mostly on AWS?
On AWS, use Secrets Manager for credentials that rotate and Parameter Store for configuration, with IAM roles — task roles on ECS, Pod Identity on EKS — doing the access control. On Kubernetes, add the External Secrets Operator rather than a second secrets system. Reach for Vault or OpenBao when you need dynamic, short-lived credentials across many systems and clouds, PKI issuance or encryption as a service — choosing OpenBao for an open-source licence and community governance, Vault Enterprise for IBM support and its enterprise features.
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As of October 25, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.