Secret Manager

A centralized API for storing and managing sensitive credentials like API keys, passwords, and certificates with fine-grained access control.

Google Cloud Secret Manager eliminates credential sprawl by providing a single source of truth for sensitive data. It handles versioning for secrets (like rotating a database password from version 1 to version 2), manages encryption via Cloud KMS, and enforces access through IAM roles. Developers call the API to fetch secrets at runtime instead of hardcoding strings in source code or environment variables. This setup ensures that a leaked config file does not result in a security breach.

https://cloud.google.com/secret-manager