Infisical Secret Management

Infisical  was conceived as a proof of concept for a secret manager tool designed for applications and environment variables. The primary appeal was based on how it integrates with development workflows. We implemented the tool via CLI for developers and deployed a self-hosted solution to integrate into applications in production.

We implemented an agent in our Kubernetes  cluster and ran applications locally via CLI, integrating directly with the self-hosted instance.

Since this was a proof of concept, using Infisical  did not have significant impact, but it provided strong evidence of the tool's capabilities and was quite positive overall.

Infisical had a positive impact on my organization, even in its proof-of-concept phase, because it integrated more seamlessly into the development environment. Starting a project with Infisical meant reducing risks compared to using .env files. The integration via CLI and the ability to configure granular access allowed us to move faster. We could begin the project knowing exactly what our responsibilities were and could fetch secrets directly without taking on as much risk as we would have with a .env file.

Infisical's best features are the ability to integrate via CLI in a very simple and easy manner. I have experience with other tools serving the same purpose, such as AWS Secrets Manager , which is more complicated to configure via CLI because you need access keys and more granular access within the cloud environment itself, given its direct contact with other resources. Having this functionality separated in Infisical and configured simply is a very strong point. The ability to integrate into a cluster in a straightforward way with agents and operators makes the configuration process very simple.

The access granularity within the platform is also relevant. You can configure solid RBAC for access to Infisical and you have the possibility of granularizing the secrets themselves through folders, allowing for more organized configuration. These are also very positive points.

Infisical could be improved by having a solution to integrate with cloud providers. This would be interesting because sometimes people hesitate to leave their cloud environment for an open-source solution due to lack of trust. If the decision had depended solely on me, we would have adopted Infisical. However, it was a joint business decision regarding a tool we did not know well, and because we already had contracted other solutions with built-in secret manager capabilities, we ended up choosing those other options. Infisical is already a very strong tool.

Better documentation is needed. When implementing the agent in Kubernetes , I had to search quite a bit to adapt it to my specific cluster. Clearer and more up-to-date documentation would greatly help in the process of integrating the tool with other solutions already in place.

I have been using Infisical for about three months.

Infisical is stable in my experience. It demonstrated stability during use.

Infisical has high scalability because it has the possibility of integrating into the cluster and offers a self-hosted solution. You can organize the space with several projects and several folders for each project, manage access, and other configurations, making it quite scalable.

Before choosing Infisical, I evaluated other options, including HashiCorp Vault  and AWS Secrets Manager .

I did not acquire Infisical through the AWS Marketplace .

We were not able to measure return on investment at the proof-of-concept stage, so we did not obtain metrics such as time savings, risk reduction, or other measurable points.

We were not able to measure return on investment at the proof-of-concept stage, so we did not obtain metrics such as time savings, risk reduction, or other measurable points.

My experience with Infisical's pricing, configuration costs, and licensing is that initially, people thought it was a bit expensive, which is why we opted for the self-hosted alternative. Because of that, we conducted the proof of concept with self-hosted, understood that there was already a solution on AWS  for this purpose, and continued with the AWS  solution.

The possibility of integrating with clouds also contributed to my rating.

We used AWS as the private cloud provider in the proof of concept.

My advice for other people thinking about using Infisical is to conduct a proof of concept to determine if it fits your organizational structure. My review rating for Infisical is eight out of ten.

Infisical  is primarily used to maintain secret variables or environment variables across different environments. When working on the development environment, environment variables that have been predefined are directly fetched. For example, if environment variables have been placed into an API folder in the development environment, they can be quickly fetched from dev/API. In the same way, if environment variables need to be fetched from staging or production, the particular command attached to that environment can be used to fetch the environmental variables associated with those environments.

Integration with Vercel has been implemented on the deployed environment. In that instance, environmental variables also need to be maintained, so the same Infisical  environments are used on the Vercel deployed environment as well, depending on the environment, which could be development, staging, or production.

Managing environmental variables in Infisical is straightforward because there is no need to specifically care about maintaining them locally on .env files or putting them into a gitignore file and maintaining them separately. With local .env file management, there is a higher security vulnerability where environmental variables could be breached. Additionally, if environmental variables are accidentally pushed to a Git  repository, that would cause problems. Managing something on Infisical helps to maintain security because it has very prominent security precautions in place.

Infisical has prevented issues in that no issues have been encountered after using it in the first place. Security features have specifically prevented issues, and according to my perspective, none of those security-related situations were encountered in the first place. The integration is smooth for other applications when using Infisical. No matter what, if the proper credentials are available, access can be obtained from anywhere at any time.

The main positive impact is that it saves a lot of time because there is no need to worry about security vulnerabilities that can occur. When it comes to workflow collaboration and efficiency, collaboration is improved because a particular organization can be created inside Infisical. Once a particular organization is created and access is given to particular people in the organization, collaboration becomes very easy. Another plus point is that everybody does not need to maintain a .env file separately. On the collaboration side, everybody can access it seamlessly since it is a central hub with separate access controls. That is really efficient because if something is changed, everybody sees it immediately, which is very valuable.

Creating multiple organizations at the same time with the pricing plan, instead of creating a very limited amount of organizations, would be a plus point for improvement. There is a limitation on how many people can be given access for a particular organization or project, which is another area that could be improved. From a features perspective, there is a little lag when running projects and importing particular secret variables. Requests to log in occur in quick succession, where sometimes it happens every five days or every ten days, which does occur from time to time, though not that frequently.

Continuous logins take place after using or importing secret variables multiple times, and that is one area for improvement. Another improvement needed is the limited number of people that can be added to a particular organization to access the secret variables.

I have used Infisical for one year.

Infisical is quite stable in my experience, and there have been no downtime or reliability issues encountered.

Scalability has been important because when scaling occurs, many secret variables are stored underneath. In that instance, scalability is present because many secret variables are now counted, stored, and handled. In that instance, it plays a crucial role.

The support team has not been encountered because there have been no issues with Infisical in the first place. In that instance, there was no chance or need to interact with their customer support to configure any problem.

Prior to Infisical, the main dependence was on .env files. No third-party solutions or API integrations were used before. This is actually the initial integration or the initial implementation for this particular topic.

There is a noticeable reduction in setup time because several tasks on the .env file previously needed to be completed, and security features had to be ensured. When particular access is given to a person in the organization who needs to access the secret variables on a particular project, it saves a lot of time because all that needs to be done is give them the particular access, and then they can log in with their GitHub  account or any organization credentials. When it comes to deployment as well, using Vercel, it is quick because once anything is changed on Infisical, it would automatically change on the Vercel environmental variables as well, depending on the particular environment. A rough estimate of time saved has not been measured on a pinpoint basis, but a lot of time is saved, and it is easy to use.

There is not much idea about the pricing and setup cost because a separate team handles those matters. From my perspective, there is nothing called a setup cost, but there is a subscription that is ongoing. The pricing seemed acceptable.

A lot of time is saved, and whenever a new employee or a new member is coming to the organization, it would be very seamless to integrate the new member or the developer. The most important return on investment would be the time saved and the seamless integration.

There is not much idea about the pricing and setup cost because a separate team handles those matters. From my perspective, there is nothing called a setup cost, but there is a subscription that is ongoing. The pricing seemed acceptable.

Doppler  was tried when evaluating other options. When going through that evaluation, Infisical was performing well with the metrics.

Most of the topics have been covered, starting from what Infisical is to customer support and improvements. The review rating for this product is 9 out of 10.

The process was straightforward. I obtained the Infisical  token and used it to log in to Infisical from the cloud machine to obtain all the secrets. The secrets were divided based on the project, so for different projects, I obtained different secrets and injected them into the environment file.

I found the process of managing and rotating tokens in Infisical easy to use. The tokens were divided into three phases: development, staging, and production, so it was very easy to rotate any token at any time in any stage.

Infisical has positively impacted my organization by helping us transition from deploying everything manually, where we had to copy-paste all the environment variables into the environment files in the cloud. Infisical helped tremendously by dynamically injecting all the tokens and secrets into the workflow, which was very fast and saved a lot of time.

I would like to add more about needed improvements. One feature that I would like to see, or that is actually already a feature, is permission management. Permission management is a bit confusing in Infisical, and it took us a lot of time to clear out the permission issues. I faced many permission issues, so I had to go back and forth with my founder to get all the permissions required for building the CI/CD pipeline and injecting the tokens into it.

I have additional thoughts about Infisical before we wrap up. If you fix the issue that I have discussed, where the system was not able to communicate with Infisical, then it would be a very good tool. I give this product a rating of eight out of ten.