Recently I have been looking at the Vault project as a means to manage secrets for applications and end-users. One of the use cases that immediately drew my attention was the ability to create dynamic role-based MySQL credentials.

Why Dynamic MySQL Credentials?

There are a few reasons why dynamic credentials would be beneficial, all of which can be handled by Vault, including:

• The database environment is too large to manage individual users.
• A need to authenticate on an external service, such as LDAP or GitHub organization.
• Provide credentials to external resources, such as auditors or outside consultants that automatically expire.
• Compliance requirements for strict audit logs for database access.

A High-Level Overview of Vault

Vault is a fairly new project by HashiCorp, the folks behind projects …

Docker has been consuming my life in the last few weeks. I have half a dozen projects in progress that use containers in some fashion, including my Visualizing MySQL’s Performance Schema project.

Since I prefer to work from a Mac laptop, I have to utilize a Linux Virtual Machine (VM) which runs the Docker daemon. Luckily, Docker Machine makes this a very simple process.

However, interacting both with Docker and Docker Machine does introduce some additional commands that I would rather simplify for the repeatable use-cases I’ve come across. With BASH aliases, this is not a problem.

Is My Docker Environment Setup?

When …