Book Image

Hands-on Kubernetes on Azure, Third Edition - Third Edition

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

Hands-on Kubernetes on Azure, Third Edition - Third Edition

By: Nills Franssens, Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan, Gunther Lenz

Overview of this book

Containers and Kubernetes containers facilitate cloud deployments and application development by enabling efficient versioning with improved security and portability. With updated chapters on role-based access control, pod identity, storing secrets, and network security in AKS, this third edition begins by introducing you to containers, Kubernetes, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and guides you through deploying an AKS cluster in different ways. You will then delve into the specifics of Kubernetes 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 applications and clusters. As you advance, you'll learn how to overcome common challenges in AKS and secure your applications with HTTPS. You will also learn how to secure your clusters and applications in a dedicated section on security. In the final section, you’ll learn about advanced integrations, which give you the ability to create Azure databases and run serverless functions on AKS as well as the ability to integrate AKS with a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline using GitHub Actions. By the end of this Kubernetes book, you will be proficient in deploying containerized workloads on Microsoft Azure with minimal management overhead.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Foreword
Free Chapter
2
Section 1: The Basics
5
Section 2: Deploying on AKS
11
Section 3: Securing your AKS cluster and workloads
16
Section 4: Integrating with Azure managed services
21
Index

Installing the Azure Key Vault provider for Secrets Store CSI driver

In the previous section, you explored secrets that were stored natively in Kubernetes. This means they were base64-encoded on the Kubernetes API server. You 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 key and secret storage solution called Azure Key Vault. It is a managed service that makes creating, storing, and retrieving keys and secrets easy, and offers auditing of access to your keys and secrets.

The Kubernetes community maintains a project called the Kubernetes Secrets Store CSI driver (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/secrets-store-csi-driver). This project allows you to integrate external secret stores with volumes in Kubernetes through the CSI driver. The Container Storage Interface is a standardized way in Kubernetes to interface with storage systems. There...