Exploring common centralized and decentralized approaches to secrets management

This post evaluates centralized versus decentralized secrets management on AWS across creation, storage, rotation, and monitoring, describing patterns (e.g., golden paths, central accounts, account-local secrets), benefits and tradeoffs of each approach, and practical recommendations—such as centralizing auditing while potentially decentralizing storage and rotation—to help organizations choose an architecture that matches their operational model and security requirements.