We plan on augmenting the documentation with a user-friendly "guides" section. A big rework of a lot of the docs is actually very high on the near term TODO list, so I'm sorry for the current state of it.
As for how you can more easily use it, we recommend [the now weirdly named] consul-template or envconsul. The former (https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template) will put secrets automatically into files and watch for changes, update the file, and refresh the process. If you put the files onto a non-swappable ramdisk, then it is reasonably secure (relative to most things, less secure than deeply integrating with Vault).
Envconsul, on the other hand, injects secrets as environment variables to a process. This is also reasonably secure but users have to be aware of the various ways that env vars can be read out of process (/proc for example).
These are the two easiest ways to get started that allow Vault to be used with brownfield software. If you greenfield something, integrating Vault 1st class is the way to go for the most security and is what we're seeing bigger users go for.
As for how you can more easily use it, we recommend [the now weirdly named] consul-template or envconsul. The former (https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template) will put secrets automatically into files and watch for changes, update the file, and refresh the process. If you put the files onto a non-swappable ramdisk, then it is reasonably secure (relative to most things, less secure than deeply integrating with Vault).
Envconsul, on the other hand, injects secrets as environment variables to a process. This is also reasonably secure but users have to be aware of the various ways that env vars can be read out of process (/proc for example).
These are the two easiest ways to get started that allow Vault to be used with brownfield software. If you greenfield something, integrating Vault 1st class is the way to go for the most security and is what we're seeing bigger users go for.