Run your own servers so the .env isn't shared with your hosting provider?
replyThere is -- you can expose a UNIX socket for serving credentials and allow access to it only from a whitelist of systemd services.
replyThat works on a single persistent box, but unfortunately, that means giving up on autoscaling, which is not so nice for cloud applications.
replyYou can proxy the UNIX socket to a network server if you want to. You can even use SSL encryption at all times too.
replyThey would still exist in plaintext, just the permissions would make it a little harder to access.
replyNo, UNIX sockets work over SSL too.
replyYou can, theoretically, decompile the system memory dump and try to mine the credentials out of the credential server's heap, but that exploit is exponentially more difficult to do that a simple `cat /proc/1234/environ`.