InfoQ: Vault is an online system that clients must request secrets from, what risk is there that a Vault outage causes down time?

Armon: HashiCorp has been in the datacenter automation space for several years, and we understand the highly-available nature of modern infrastructure. When we designed Vault, high availability was a critical part of the design, not something we tried to bolt on later. Vault makes use of coordination services like Consul or Zookeeper to perform leader election. This means you can deploy multiple Vault instances, such that if one fails there is an automatic failover to a healthy instance. We typically recommend deploying at least two Vault servers to mitigate the impact if a single instance should fail.