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

Introduction to Workload Identity

Workload Identity on Kubernetes Engine on GCP enables us to assign permissions to Kubernetes workloads that can interact with Google Cloud resources. Google Cloud has the concept of service accounts. Service accounts are used for machines to interact with resources. A compute engine, a lambda function, or even an App Engine on Google Cloud can be assigned with a service account that has permissions to interact with Google Cloud resources. With Workload Identity, we can map service accounts on GCP with service accounts on Kubernetes.

In Kubernetes, we might use several types of deployments for our applications. We can use Deployment, StatefulSet, DaemonSet, and more. Behind the scenes, a Pod will be created, which is the base component for running applications on Kubernetes. The Pod can be assigned a service account. By using Workload Identity on Kubernetes and binding a Kubernetes service account to a Google Cloud service account, the Pod with the...