Credential distribution/storage across fleets

What are the options for secure password/credential storage on a host and propagation of changes across a fleet of hosts?

An example would be you have fleet of size N and y开发者_StackOverflow社区ou want to store credentials, such as AWS access keys, on those hosts. The simple approach is to store it in the source code or a config file, but this is bad because it's usually plain text. Also, if you make a change to the credentials you then want them to propagate to all of the hosts in the fleet.

Are there any solutions that would allow for something along these lines?

Credentials credentials = new Credentials();
system.doAction( credentials.getCredential("CredentialKeyId") );

This is assuming a non-Windows fleet.

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Are you asking for something similar to NIS? To Kerberos, maybe?