Hey everyone — I’ve been running Absolute Secure Access Claw agents on a few of our production servers for about six months now, mostly to manage secure tunnels to internal tools. It’s been solid for connectivity, but I keep hitting a snag with secret rotation.
Our security policy requires we rotate credentials every 90 days. For short-lived agents or containers, it’s easy: redeploy with new secrets. But for these long-running Claw agents on persistent VMs, I’m stuck between:
- Restarting the agent service (causes a brief tunnel drop)
- Fully redeploying the agent (more disruptive)
- Some kind of live reload via API or config push (if that exists)
What’s the best practice here? I’d love to hear how others are handling it.
A few things I’ve tried/considered:
- Using a config management tool to push new env vars and restart the service — works, but I’d prefer zero downtime.
- Storing secrets in a vault and having the agent pull periodically — not sure if Claw supports that natively.
- Creating a new agent instance and phasing out the old one — feels heavy for just a secret rotation.
Has anyone set up a smooth rotation workflow, especially in automated/CI-CD environments? Bonus points if it works well with HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager.
— Kevin
Benchmark or bust
I'm a data infrastructure lead at a mid-market fintech company, and we've been running Absolute Secure Access Claw agents on over fifty production and staging hosts for about two years to facilitate analyst access to our internal data warehouse and orchestration UI, so maintaining tunnel uptime during rotations is critical for us.
The best method depends heavily on your automation tolerance and security requirements, but I've evaluated three main approaches in production.
1. **Scheduled Service Restart with Config Management**
This is the most straightforward method we initially used with Ansible. We stored the new credentials in our secrets manager, and the playbook would update the environment file on the host and execute a `systemctl restart claw-agent`. The tunnel drop is brief, typically 8-15 seconds in our environment, but it's a defined blip. The hidden cost is orchestration complexity if you have staggered windows, and you must ensure your health checks tolerate the restart.
2. **Vault Sidecar with Dynamic Secrets**
We later moved to a HashiCorp Vault sidecar container on each host, using Vault's database secrets engine for our backend services. The Claw agent's configuration references a short-lived secret file that the sidecar renews and rewrites. The agent must support config file reloading, which Claw does via a SIGHUP signal. This achieves near-zero downtime; we send SIGHUP after the file is rewritten, causing about 2 seconds of latency but no drop. The integration effort is significant, requiring a vault instance and sidecar management.
3. **Agent Redeployment via Immutable Infrastructure**
We tested this in our Kubernetes clusters by treating the agent as a DaemonSet pod with the secret as a volume mount. Rotating the secret in the control plane and deleting the pods for a rolling restart is seamless at the platform level. For persistent VMs, this would mean baking new credentials into an AMI/Golden Image and cycling your auto-scaling group. This is the heaviest lift, with deployment times stretching to 10-15 minutes per batch, but it's the most secure as no secret is mutated in-place.
4. **Phase-in with New Agent Instances**
This is a more complex variant where you deploy a parallel agent with new credentials, update your DNS or load balancer to point to the new tunnel endpoint, and then decommission the old agent. We found this required dual connectivity for the duration and a supporting network architecture. It added about 20% more resource overhead during the transition window and required manual validation steps, making it brittle for full automation at our scale.
My pick is the Vault sidecar with SIGHUP reload, specifically if you already have a centralized secrets manager and can tolerate the operational overhead of maintaining the sidecar process. It provides the closest to zero downtime and aligns with audit trails in the vault logs. If you don't have that infrastructure, tell us your automation stack and whether your security team mandates a full secret destruction on rotation, as that would push you toward the redeployment path.
Data doesn't lie, but folks sometimes do.