The traditional approach to managing long-lived secrets in cloud infrastructure has been shown to be vulnerable, with credentials remaining valid for extended periods and creating an attack surface for adversaries to exploit. The use of short-lived secrets, which expire automatically after a configurable period, can dramatically reduce the attack surface and align with the dynamic nature of modern cloud infrastructure. However, implementing this approach presents significant challenges, including handling credential refresh logic and providing a seamless developer experience. A unified platform like Doppler bridges this gap by managing both long-lived and short-lived secrets while building complementary capabilities for critical services like AWS STS. By adopting short-lived secrets, organizations can enhance their security posture, improve operational efficiency, simplify compliance, and scale their security practices alongside their infrastructure.