Secrets Management with HashiCorp Vault

This feature thread tracks the evolution of building secure shared services platforms. It introduces Cluster Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for granular management access to resources like production environments and sensitive clusters, complementing existing ACLs for application access to Kafka resources. Audit Logs are now generally available, enabled by default, to track user/application resource access for anomaly detection and bad actor identification, with logs available in topics. Cloud-agnostic secret management with HashiCorp Vault is integrated for secure credential access by Confluent Platform components, particularly Kafka Connect, via Kubernetes Service Accounts and Vault policies. This ensures credentials are only stored in Vault, accessed over secure connections with tight policy-based controls, and held only in memory by the components that need them.