[ptoomey3]

We recently developed/deployed a simple “crypto as a service” API for other apps/services to use for easy encrypting, integrity protecting, etc. It was originally developed with an HSM and eventually decided to redo it without. There were lots of unanswered questions with the HSM in terms of having the operational experience to know how they would scale across data centers, how well replication would work, how well failovers would work, etc. We had much stronger confidence in a plain old golang service, MySQL, and leveraging Vault as a master key issuer. We basically key wrap/integrity protect everything in the DB and present a simple Grpc interface. An HSM would have been nice, but a small/simple service isolated from other systems largely gets us what we want, and with the confidence to scale it as we would any other application.