Final answer:
To access Key Vault without managing external secrets, utilize managed identity solutions or orchestration tools that inject secrets directly into the application runtime, ensuring secure and automated secret management.
Step-by-step explanation:
To access Key Vault without the hassle of managing external secrets, you can leverage managed identity solutions provided by cloud providers, such as Azure's Managed Identities. With managed identities, you do not need to manage credentials. Instead, an identity is provided to your application, which uses it to authenticate to services that support Azure AD authentication, including Key Vault. Another approach could utilize environment-specific variables that are securely managed by orchestration tools like Kubernetes, which can inject secrets into your application without you having to handle them directly.
These methods of accessing Key Vault help to automate the security of your applications by allowing secure, scalable, and maintenance-free solutions for secret management. Moreover, they adhere to the principle of least privilege, only permitting access to the secrets that are required for the application to function properly.