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Design a Secrets Management and Rotation Workflow is a medium low-level design interview question covering operational design, sre, devops, secrets management, security — the kind asked at FAANG (Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and AI-first companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia.
Design how secrets are stored, delivered and rotated across a fleet of services. In scope are database passwords, API keys and certificates, some issued by systems you control and some by third parties. Secrets are currently injected as environment variables at startup. Rotation must be routine and non-disruptive, and there must also be a way to revoke a credential immediately when someone leaks one. Explain how a service authenticates to the secret store in the first place.
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