**Secret management is critical for success in any platform, especially with microservices-based architecture. It enables better handling of dynamic environments and maintains security without sacrificing flexibility and scalability. However, implementing a secret management solution can be challenging due to added complexity across dev, staging, and production environments. The key areas evaluated when looking for a solution include security, robustness and scalability, access via standard APIs and libraries, user and group management, platform agnosticism, and tools such as HashiCorp's Vault and Consul. These tools offer dynamic credentials, identity-based access control, partitioning of secrets, high availability deployment options, configurable storage backends, and standardized API and library access. The authors used Vault and Consul helm charts for their Kubernetes deployment, achieving a consistent and reliable secret store with standard access mechanisms, ability to manage user policies, segregating secrets by environment, robustness and scalability, platform agnosticism, multi-tenancy, and configurable storage backends. Lessons learned include the importance of scalability, configuration flexibility, resource reservation, auto-unseal mechanism, and understanding storage backends supported by Vault. The choice of tool ultimately depends on the project's specific requirements and objectives.