bobbylarson

The profile-plus-orchestrator pattern is a clean answer, and re-inject existing at all puts you ahead of most setups I have seen. The remaining edge: a process that read the credential at boot still holds the old value in memory after a pull. Is re-inject a workload restart, or does something force consumers to re-read? That is the part I have never seen solved cleanly without short TTLs.

The Profiles idea is the interesting part. Injection at creation is the easy half; the hard half is revocation mid-session. If a credential in a profile rotates or gets pulled while a box is up for days, does the running VM keep the old value until restart? For long horizon agents that window is where the risk actually lives.

The thing that surprised me running relays for robot fleets: relay was not the fallback, it was the common case. Hole punching fails a lot behind enterprise NAT.