---
name: secrets-manager-developers
title: Best practices for using Secrets Manager
description: Review the following suggested guidelines for implementing best practices around your secrets management with IBM Cloud® Secrets Manager.
last-updated: 2026-07-08
---

> ## Documentation Index
> The table of contents for this documentation set is at https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/secrets-manager?format=markdown
> The index for all IBM Cloud docs is at: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use these files to discover more information as needed.

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# Best practices for using Secrets Manager
{: #best-practices-using}

Review the following suggested guidelines for implementing best practices around your secrets management with IBM Cloud® Secrets Manager.
{: shortdesc}


- IBM Cloud® Secrets Manager is a regional service. Provision Secrets Manager instances per region to spread your workloads and limit the impact of a regional outage.
- Secrets Manager is a single-tenant service. CPU and memory limits are applied per Secrets Manager instance. Those limits restrict the API request rates based on the usage pattern. As a rule of thumb, it is recommended to keep the rate below 20 req/s. Additionally, limit the number of unique clients that make requests to a single Secrets Manager instance.
- Use Secrets Manager as a cold storage. Apply caching and throttling to regulate the rate of requests to a Secrets Manager instance.
- During service failover, requests may be temporarily unavailable for up to 30 seconds. Ensure your application includes appropriate retry logic for read and write operations and timeout handling.