HashiCorp - Vault Associate Study Guide

7: Vault architecture fundamentals

This chapter defines the architectural machinery that sits under every request Vault serves, from the encryption barrier that wraps the storage backend, through the active-standby cluster model that keeps a single writer authoritative, to the Shamir-share threshold that gates the seal lifecycle. It closes with the environment variables a client uses to bind itself to a specific node, namespace, and TLS trust chain, so that the CLI, SDK, and Agent all target the correct endpoint without embedding credentials in configuration files.