[apopapo]

What's wrong with committing encrypted secrets? That's how I use `sops`.

[JeffMcCune]

You can’t revoke, rotate, or audit access to them.

[NewJazz]

You can rotate them, although admittedly it can be more or less complicated depending on how your tooling compares to that of the secrets management system you are comparing against.

You can't necessarily revoke a secret just because it is in Hashicorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager. Revocation is a function of the system that provisions and/or uses the secret for authentication, not the system that stores the secret. E.g. if you generate a certificate and store the private key with vault or sops, the revocation procedure is identical and has nothing to do with the secrets storage system.

Auditing access can be done coarsely by auditing access to the encryption key. Admittedly, this is an area where a more sophisticated system offers benefits. Although it isn't exactly iron clad -- a service may access a secret then leak or transfer the secret without that being visible in the audit log.

[nodesocket]

I would venture to guess the main concern is accidental commit of decrypted secrets.

[NewJazz]

That can happen regardless.

[thomasingalls]

If a key gets compromised, the encrypted secrets are compromised forever, since you can't be sure all the git clones everywhere can be updated with a new encryption key. Not to mention how fiddly it is to edit git history.