Is Service binding approach using spring cloud connectors relevant when credentials are stored in Vault?

Question

I have been using the Spring cloud Service connectors for Pivotal cloud foundry for a long time which gets the connection details from the VCAP_SERVICES env variable. Now we have a requirement to read these credentials from Vault . I am just curious , Can I still continue to use the Service binding approach with spring cloud connector ? I would assume we don't want to expose these credentials from vault to an VCAP_SERVICES variable which defeat the purpose of the vault. Has there been any enhancements in Spring cloud connectors to read the credentials directly from Vault rather than depending the VCAP_SERVICES env variable or should I resort back to the Spring boot's default Application Properties based approach instead of the service binding approach using cloud connectors ?

Answer 1

The Spring Cloud Connectors project is now in maintenance mode, in favor of the newer Java CFEnv project. However, Java CFEnv is also very specific to Cloud Foundry's VCAP_SERVICES model of exposing service bindings and won't help you if the service connection info is in Vault.

I would suggest that you fall back to the Spring Boot properties-based approach using Spring Cloud Vault or Spring Cloud Config Server's Vault integration to automate fetching the properties from Vault and making them available as Spring Boot properties.