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

Real-world examples of how Kubernetes Secrets are used in production environments

So far, we have seen some different approaches to managing Kubernetes Secrets. We will proceed and see examples of how Secrets are managed in a production environment. We will compare some different approaches, identifying their differences and looking at the pros and cons.

Qualities of Secrets management in production

When it comes to Kubernetes Secrets management in production, regardless of the approach taken, certain qualities need to be satisfied. These qualities make our production deployment robust and secure. The qualities are as follows:

  • High availability
  • Disaster recovery
  • Encryption
  • Auditing

Let us deep dive into each one of them.

High availability

Kubernetes is highly available; we saw how in Chapter 1, Understanding Kubernetes Secrets Management. A secret stored in Kubernetes will be stored on etcd, and etcd nodes are part of the Kubernetes cluster. If...