Migrating AWS System Manager Parameter Store Secrets to a new Namespace

When starting with a new tool it is common to jump in start doing things. Over time you learn how to do things better. Amazon’s AWS System Manager (SSM) Parameter Store was like that for me. I started off polluting the global namespace with all my secrets. Over time I learned to use paths to create namespaces. This helps a lot when it comes to managing access.

Recently I’ve been using Parameter Store a lot. During this time I have been reminded that naming things is hard. This lead to me needing to change some paths in SSM Parameter Store. Unfortunately AWS doesn’t allow you to rename param store keys, you have to create new ones.

There was no way I was going to manually copy and paste all those secrets. Python (3.6) to the rescue! I wrote a script to copy the values to the new namespace. While I was at it I migrated them to use a new KMS key for encryption.

Grab the code from my gist, make it executable, pip install boto3 if you need to, then run it like so:

    copy-ssm-ps-path.py source-tree-name target-tree-name new-kms-uuid

The script assumes all parameters are encrypted. The same key is used for all parameters. boto3 expects your AWS credentials to be in ~/.aws or environment variables.

Once everything is verified, you can use a modified version of the script that calls ssm.delete_parameter() or do it via the console.

I hope this saves someone some time.