Book Image

Getting Started with Kubernetes - Third Edition

By : Jonathan Baier, Jesse White
Book Image

Getting Started with Kubernetes - Third Edition

By: Jonathan Baier, Jesse White

Overview of this book

Kubernetes has continued to grow and achieve broad adoption across various industries, helping you to orchestrate and automate container deployments on a massive scale. Based on the recent release of Kubernetes 1.12, Getting Started with Kubernetes gives you a complete understanding of how to install a Kubernetes cluster. The book focuses on core Kubernetes constructs, such as pods, services, replica sets, replication controllers, and labels. You will understand cluster-level networking in Kubernetes, and learn to set up external access to applications running in the cluster. As you make your way through the book, you'll understand how to manage deployments and perform updates with minimal downtime. In addition to this, you will explore operational aspects of Kubernetes , such as monitoring and logging, later moving on to advanced concepts such as container security and cluster federation. You'll get to grips with integrating your build pipeline and deployments within a Kubernetes cluster, and be able to understand and interact with open source projects. In the concluding chapters, you'll orchestrate updates behind the scenes, avoid downtime on your cluster, and deal with underlying cloud provider instability within your cluster. By the end of this book, you'll have a complete understanding of the Kubernetes platform and will start deploying applications on it.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Securing sensitive application data (secrets)


Sometimes, our application needs to hold sensitive information. This can be credentials or tokens to log in to a database or service. Storing this sensitive information in the image itself is something to be avoided. Here, Kubernetes provides us with a solution in the construct of secrets.

Secrets give us a way to store sensitive information without including plaintext versions in our resource definition files. Secrets can be mounted to the pods that need them and then accessed within the pod as files with the secret values as content. Alternatively, you can also expose the secrets via environment variables.

Note

Given that Kubernetes still relies on plaintext etcd storage, you may want to explore integration with more mature secrets vaults, such as Vault from Hashicorp. There is even a GitHub project for integration: https://github.com/Boostport/kubernetes-vault.

We can easily create a secret either with YAML or on the command line. Secrets do need...