Book Image

Argo CD in Practice

By : Liviu Costea, Spiros Economakis
Book Image

Argo CD in Practice

By: Liviu Costea, Spiros Economakis

Overview of this book

GitOps follows the practices of infrastructure as code (IaC), allowing developers to use their day-to-day tools and practices such as source control and pull requests to manage apps. With this book, you’ll understand how to apply GitOps bootstrap clusters in a repeatable manner, build CD pipelines for cloud-native apps running on Kubernetes, and minimize the failure of deployments. You’ll start by installing Argo CD in a cluster, setting up user access using single sign-on, performing declarative configuration changes, and enabling observability and disaster recovery. Once you have a production-ready setup of Argo CD, you’ll explore how CD pipelines can be built using the pull method, how that increases security, and how the reconciliation process occurs when multi-cluster scenarios are involved. Next, you’ll go through the common troubleshooting scenarios, from installation to day-to-day operations, and learn how performance can be improved. Later, you’ll explore the tools that can be used to parse the YAML you write for deploying apps. You can then check if it is valid for new versions of Kubernetes, verify if it has any security or compliance misconfigurations, and that it follows the best practices for cloud-native apps running on Kubernetes. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build a real-world CD pipeline using Argo CD.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Fundamentals of GitOps and Argo CD
4
Part 2: Argo CD as a Site Reliability Engineer
7
Part 3: Argo CD in Production

Keeping secrets safe

As we are talking about GitOps and declarative configuration (K8s manifests, Helm, and so on) in a Git repository, the first problem we need to address is how we can store the secrets safely. Let’s see how we can achieve this in GitOps.

Storing secrets safely

The most secure way to store them is to keep them in a secret management tool such as Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, or Google’s Secret Manager. But how can you do this integration with Kubernetes Secrets and a declarative manifest and utilize GitOps practices?

There is a tool called External Secrets Operator. As the K8s operator is designed for automation, External Secrets Operator more specifically will synchronize secrets from external APIs such as AWS Secret Manager, Vault, and a couple of others into Kubernetes Secret resources.

The whole idea is that there are a few new K8s custom resources that will define where the secret is and how to complete the synchronization...