Book Image

Kubernetes Secrets Handbook

By : Emmanouil Gkatziouras, Rom Adams, Chen Xi
Book Image

Kubernetes Secrets Handbook

By: Emmanouil Gkatziouras, Rom Adams, Chen Xi

Overview of this book

Securing Secrets in containerized apps poses a significant challenge for Kubernetes IT professionals. This book tackles the critical task of safeguarding sensitive data, addressing the limitations of Kubernetes encryption, and establishing a robust Secrets management system for heightened security for Kubernetes. Starting with the fundamental Kubernetes architecture principles and how they apply to the design of Secrets management, this book delves into advanced Kubernetes concepts such as hands-on security, compliance, risk mitigation, disaster recovery, and backup strategies. With the help of practical, real-world guidance, you’ll learn how to mitigate risks and establish robust Secrets management as you explore different types of external secret stores, configure them in Kubernetes, and integrate them with existing Secrets management solutions. Further, you'll design, implement, and operate a secure method of managing sensitive payload by leveraging real use cases in an iterative process to enhance skills, practices, and analytical thinking, progressively strengthening the security posture with each solution. By the end of this book, you'll have a rock-solid Secrets management solution to run your business-critical applications in a hybrid multi-cloud scenario, addressing operational risks, compliance, and controls.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Introduction to Kubernetes Secrets Management
6
Part 2: Advanced Topics – Kubernetes Secrets in a Production Environment
10
Part 3: Kubernetes Secrets Providers

Overview of AWS Secrets Manager

A secret is a concept that exists outside the realm of Kubernetes. Any type of application will at some point require sensitive information to be integrated with each deployment. An application deployed in the cloud requires secure secret handling. For this reason, cloud providers offer components for secret storage.

When it comes to Kubernetes, we saw in Chapter 1, Understanding Kubernetes Secrets Management, that secret information is stored on etcd. Essentially, etcd is the default secret store of Kubernetes. The crucial question is whether it is possible to have external storage for Secrets on Kubernetes apart from etcd.

This is feasible provided you actively use a cloud provider’s secret storage, or you consider taking advantage of it and utilizing it on Kubernetes. Thanks to the Container Storage Interface and the workload identity, we can utilize the available secret stores.

AWS Secrets Manager (https://aws.amazon.com/secrets-manager...