When would I need to use Spring Cloud Config with Vault instead of just using Spring Cloud Vault?

Question

I'm in a project where we're using Spring Cloud Config Server with Vault backend and I don't know why we need the cloud config server. Before I attempt to move this to a simpler implementation with Spring Cloud Vault, I want to know if there is a reason I would keep Spring Cloud Config with Vault.

• Spring Cloud Vault - http://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-vault/
• Spring Cloud Config Server with Vault backend - https://dzone.com/articles/integrating-vault-with-spring-cloud-config-server

I know there's a similar question out there already but it does not answer why we would use one over the other: Difference between Spring Cloud Vault and Spring Cloud Config with Vault backend

Answer 1

This is more like a long comment than a specific answer since I think this question is a bit off topic since it looks like an opinion based question.

Spring Cloud Vault is a maven dependency on your project like this: org.springframework.cloud spring-cloud-starter-vault-config

With above dependency you have just to create the bootstrap.yml (or .properties) with vault properties on your project and it is going to connect to vault. So, if you have one spring boot application then your backend would look like:

[yourApp:8080] --> [vault:8200]

On the other hand, if you use Spring Cloud Config with vault then you have actually two separate spring boot applications (let say microservices) and also vault, so you would have:

[yourApp:8080] --> [cloudConfig:8888] --> [vault:8200]

In addition, despite you can use Spring Cloud Vault instead of Spring Cloud Config to pull properties, vault intention is to store secrets (sensitive information, credentials, etc) so Spring Cloud Vault helps you to connect your application to vault. Spring Cloud Config server is focused to centralize applications properties storage, it also provides multiple endpoints to fetch these properties and much more features that helps on a microservice architecture.