Managing Secrets with AWS Secrets Manager in Terraform

Introduction: The Golden Rule of Cloud Security

In the early days of software development, many engineers followed a pattern that is now considered a cardinal sin: hardcoding credentials directly into source code. Whether it was a database password, an API key, or an SSH private key, these sensitive strings lived in version control systems like Git. The result? A single accidental git push to a public repository could compromise an entire organization's infrastructure.