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 Azure Key Vault

Azure Key Vault is a versatile service. It can be used as a secret storage. On Azure Key Vault, we can store cryptographic keys. Also, Azure Key Vault can be used to perform encryption and decryption operations.

Since it is a managed Azure service, it benefits from the features that Azure provides by default on its services.

The features of interest are as follows:

  • Azure RBAC and access policy
  • High availability
  • Logging, auditing, and monitoring
  • Integration with other Azure components

We will take some time to examine these features that are crucial to the security of our Secrets.

Azure RBAC and access policy

Every service on Azure is protected from unauthorized usage through an identity access management layer that Azure provides. This layer comes in the form of Azure’s RBAC and access policy. A security principal is an entity that has an identity on Azure and can be a user account, group account, or computer...