Book Image

Hands-On Kubernetes on Azure - Second Edition

By : Nills Franssens, Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan, Gunther Lenz
Book Image

Hands-On Kubernetes on Azure - Second Edition

By: Nills Franssens, Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan, Gunther Lenz

Overview of this book

From managing versioning efficiently to improving security and portability, technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker have greatly helped cloud deployments and application development. Starting with an introduction to Docker, Kubernetes, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), this book will guide you through deploying an AKS cluster in different ways. You’ll then explore the Azure portal by deploying a sample guestbook application on AKS and installing complex Kubernetes apps using Helm. With the help of real-world examples, you'll also get to grips with scaling your application and cluster. As you advance, you'll understand how to overcome common challenges in AKS and secure your application with HTTPS and Azure AD (Active Directory). Finally, you’ll explore serverless functions such as HTTP triggered Azure functions and queue triggered functions. By the end of this Kubernetes book, you’ll be well-versed with the fundamentals of Azure Kubernetes Service and be able to deploy containerized workloads on Microsoft Azure with minimal management overhead.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
4
Section 2: Deploying on AKS
10
Section 3: Leveraging advanced Azure PaaS services
15
Index

Using secrets stored in Key Vault

In the previous section, we explored secrets that were stored natively in Kubernetes. This means they were stored base64-encoded on the Kubernetes API server (in the background, they will be stored in an etcd database, but that is part of the managed service provided by Microsoft). We saw in the previous section that base64-encoded secrets are not secure at all. For highly secure environments, you will want to use a better secret store.

Azure offers an industry-compliant secrets storage solution called Azure Key Vault. It is a managed service that makes creating, storing, and retrieving secrets easy, and offers good monitoring of access to your secrets. Microsoft maintains an open-source project that allows you to mount secrets in Key Vault to your application. This solution is called Key Vault FlexVolume and is available here: https://github.com/Azure/kubernetes-keyvault-flexvol.

In this section, we will create a Key Vault and install Key Vault...