Summary
This chapter walked through multiple aspects of secrets management. We began by discussing the difference between secret data and more generic configuration data. We considered why Kubernetes stores and represents Secret objects as base64-encoded text, and why you shouldn’t store secret data in git. There was also a discussion on threat modelling secret data in Kubernetes clusters. Next, we then walked through various ways to store and manage secret data including Secret objects, external vaults, Sealed Secrets, and hybrid approaches. Finally, we walked through integrating your secrets into your workloads via volume mounts, environment variables, and directly with APIs.
Having finished this chapter, you should now have enough information and examples to build your own secrets management strategy for your clusters.
In the next chapter, we are going to begin focusing on multi-tenancy with virtual clusters.
