How to Manage Application Secrets (7 Levels of Credential Management)
TL;DR: If you develop web applications, inevitably you will have secrets (database credentials, 3rd party API keys, etc…) that you need to manage. I have seen a variety of approaches used here and wanted to walk through them, from least secure to most.
https://devopsdirective.com/posts/2020/11/credential-management/