Accessing AWS Secret Manager outside the AWS environment (such as development evironment set up in our laptop i.e. local machine)

Question

Hi community,

We are new to [AWS Secret Manger](https://aws.amazon.com/secrets-manager/) and we recently decided to adopt it as it's a secure way to store all the credentials, access keys, etc.
One of the cloud expert mentioned that the secret manager CLI can be accessed only within AWS VPC. 
However, we are curious on ** whether AWS secret manager services (e.g., via CLI) can be accessed outside the AWS envrionment (such as development evironment set up in our laptop i.e. local machine) **as long as the IAM user has the appropriate permissions set to read the Secret Manager keys, without any needs for VPC/VPN or so.

Answer

Hi,

You do not have to use a VPC or need to be within a VPC to access AWS Secrets Manager. As you have mentioned, the CLI is one way of interaction.
In the documentation is a tutorial for creating and retrieving secrets from Secrets Manager: 
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/secretsmanager/latest/userguide/tutorials_basic.html

For completeness - You have the option to not use the public api over the internet and instead use a VPC endpoint. This can be a compliance / regulatory requirement.
Here is an blog post covering that in more detail: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-connect-to-aws-secrets-manager-service-within-a-virtual-private-cloud/

Accessing AWS Secret Manager outside the AWS environment (such as development evironment set up in our laptop i.e. local machine)

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