March 2024 Summaries

When we started Infisical, our goal was to build the platform with a stack that aligned with our strategy and felt most familiar with the team. We chose MongoDB + Mongoose ORM due to its low overhead and ability to ship quality features quickly. However, as time passed, many organizations preferred self-hosting due to compliance and security concerns. To improve self-hosting, we addressed issues with MongoDB, but realized that a full database migration was needed. This led us to announce the deprecation of the MongoDB storage backend and migration to PostgreSQL for Infisical. We chose PostgreSQL because of its vibrant community, extensive documentation, open source nature, and widespread adoption by cloud providers. Users can now self-host Infisical with PostgreSQL, and we've provided migration instructions for those who were previously using MongoDB. A 2-month deprecation window is available until May 25th, 2024, during which time support will be prioritized for paid and enterprise customers, and minor patches will be pushed out. After this period, support for Infisical with MongoDB will be halted.

The author, Tony Dang, shares the story of Infisical's decision to migrate from MongoDB to PostgreSQL, a database management system. The company had grown rapidly and needed to upgrade its stack to handle increasing usage demands. They chose PostgreSQL due to its ease of management, built-in support for transactions, relational capabilities, and extensive documentation. The migration process was complex, involving the re-write of dozens of data structures and hundreds of queries across the application. Despite initial challenges, the team successfully executed the migration within a six-hour window with minimal downtime, resulting in significant performance gains, improved data validation, and easier self-hosting capabilities for customers. The author concludes that the initiative was highly successful and recommends careful planning and discussion before attempting similar big endeavors.

AWS Secrets Manager is a managed service designed to handle secure storage, rotation, and retrieval of secrets like database credentials and API keys, integrating tightly with AWS services for ease of use within the AWS ecosystem. In contrast, HashiCorp Vault is a source-available tool for secrets management, encryption as a service, and privileged access management, offering a centralized place to store and access secrets in dynamic environments. Both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, with AWS Secrets Manager being suitable for organizations heavily invested in the AWS ecosystem, while HashiCorp Vault offers a highly-customizable solution for multi-cloud environments. Alternatively, Infisical, an open-source secret management platform, provides a developer-friendly solution with low maintenance overhead and seamless integration across technology stacks and systems. Ultimately, a thorough evaluation aligned with organizational security policies, compliance requirements, and infrastructure needs will guide the choice between these solutions.