This sort of model also fits nicely with the AWS ecosystem. EC2 instances (virtual machines) can be given an IAM Role when they boot-up. An IAM Role is essentially an automatically generated access key which is unique to that EC2 instance, and has pre-determined permissions.

So in other words – a unique key is generated every time a virtual machine is created. It's fully automated, never shared between instances, and never needs to be handled manually. That key will give the virtual machine permission to access other AWS services, in this case the AWS Secrets Manager.

So as long as you're using EC2 instances, you won't need to worry about securely passing a 'master password' to your VMs in order for them to access secrets.

I see. So there actually is a bit of magic involved.

I exist, therefore I can.

Yep - they have similar functionality for task roles (aka docker containers on ECS) and Lambdas as well.

If you're interested in building it as a web app but want a keyboard-accessible grid / spreadsheet-like interface, then you have a few options.

The first resource I'd recommend is JSpreadsheets, which is a list of open-source JavaScript spreadsheet & data grid libraries. https://jspreadsheets.com

One of the most fully-featured JS libraries is Handsontable. It looks very flexible. They have some demos on their website to play with: https://handsontable.com/examples.html?headers

(Bonus: If you're using react, there's already a react component for using Handsontable: https://github.com/handsontable/react-handsontable )

I think @telesilla's point is that a Skype call would be going through all the cellular network's infrastructure, and then off to Microsoft, before coming back.

It's an extra link in the chain, meaning another potential bottleneck and added latency.