Let's take a closer look at the fragmented NHI inventory from a site reliability engineer's perspective.

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Modern cloud-native stacks create fragmented Non-Human Identity (NHI) sprawl across HashiCorp Vault, AWS IAM, Kubernetes, Jenkins, and GitLab CI. From an SRE perspective, this fragmentation causes blind spots, compliance gaps, and slow incident response. Secret managers alone are insufficient because IAM roles, CI secrets, and dynamically generated credentials live outside their scope. The post walks through the risks of unmanaged NHIs, provides Python code snippets for inventorying NHIs from AWS IAM and GitLab CI, discusses the trade-offs of building a custom aggregation portal versus adopting a managed solution, and ultimately promotes GitGuardian NHI Governance as a centralized discovery and policy enforcement platform.

SRE Playbook: A Guide to Discover and Catalog Non-Human Identities (NHI)

2. An Introduction to Non-Human Identities (NHIs)

4. The NHI Playbook: Establish a Central Plane for Observability

5. Why the DIY Solution Might Not Be For You