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

Creating, modifying, and deleting Secrets in Kubernetes

Previously, we focused on creating Secrets and displaying their usage. We will proceed further on administrating Secrets and identify the available commands and options for provisioning Kubernetes Secrets.

data and stringData

We applied plaintext Secrets either by using a YAML file or through the command line. Behind the scenes, the Secrets that we applied in plaintext were converted to a base64 format. We can either apply Secrets in plaintext or apply them using base64; eventually, they will end up residing on Kubernetes in a base64 format. When we apply a secret using plaintext values, we use the stringData field. Kubernetes will handle the encoding and decoding of the values we provided.

Take, for example, the following secret:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: plain-text
type: Opaque
stringData:
  value: non-base64

Once we create the secret, we will retrieve it. It should be in...