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

Technical requirements

To link concepts with hands-on examples, we are leveraging a series of tools and platforms commonly used to interact with containers, Kubernetes, and Secrets management. For this chapter, we are continuing with the same set of tools used in the earlier chapters:

  • Docker (https://docker.com) and Podman (https://podman.io) can both be used as a container engine. Both are OK, although I do have a personal preference for Podman as it offers benefits such as being daemonless for easy installation, rootless for added security, fully OCI compliant, and Kubernetes-ready, and it integrates with systemd at the user level to autostart containers/Pods.
  • Podman Desktop (https://podman-desktop.io) is an open source software providing a graphical user interface to build, start, and debug containers, run local Kubernetes instances, ease the migration from container to Pod, and even connect with remote platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes Engine, and...