Modern infrastructure depends on secure secret management, yet achieving high availability (HA) often feels like a luxury reserved for enterprise budgets.
In this blog, we’ll explore how you can build a highly available, production-grade HashiCorp Vault cluster using Raft Integrated Storage and the community edition of MinIO (an S3-compatible object storage) for resilient backups. Everything was implemented in my homelab.
Why This Approach?
Many organizations, especially those operating on tight budgets or in hybrid environments, require strong security but cannot always afford enterprise secret management service.
Instead of depending on Vault Enterprise with external storage solutions such as Consul, etcd, or DynamoDB, my approach leverages:
- Vault OSS (Open Source) for secret management
- Raft storage for native leader election and data replication
- MinIO for S3-compatible snapshot backups
This setup provides HA, fault tolerance, and easy disaster recovery, all without extra licensing costs.
Architecture Overview
Here’s what the setup looks like:
Each Vault node runs in HA mode using Raft. The leader handles writing and replicating data to followers automatically.
Snapshots are taken periodically and pushed to MinIO for offsite/off-cluster recovery.
Note: All three servers used in this setup are provisioned within a homelab environment.
⚙️ Step 1: Prepare Your Environment
Provision 3 servers (VMs or bare metal).
Ensure network connectivity between them and install:
sudo apt install vault
sudo mkdir -p /opt/vault/tls /opt/vault/data /opt/vault/backups
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