actions-runner-controller VS sealed-secrets

To set-up the self-hosted runner, an Action Runner Controller (ARC) and Runner scale sets application will be installed via helm. This post will be using Azure Kubernetes Service and ARC that is officialy maintained by Github. There is another ARC that is maintained by the community. You can follow the discussion where github adopted the ARC project into a full Github product here

Before this we were using https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller but that's running on K8s instead of VMs. So along with common limitations of running CI jos in K8s/container, it cannot have exactly the same environment as the official GitHub runners. Maintaining a K8s cluster was also very difficult.

ARC is great for running GitHub Actions on Kubernetes:

https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller

Almost all of our cicd, builds run on GitHub. I'm talking cypress tests, deployments via terraform and helm to over 25 environments, all backend tests, daily test runs etc. Overall we were racking up a cost of almost 20k on GitHub. With the ARC deployed and using spot instances I think our total infrastructure costs went up about 4-5k even though we added more actions. If we switched back to their runners we'd probably be around 25k at this point.

What else needs to be moved to my artifactory (charts - https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller/tree/master/charts ) - if so tar or entire folder or anything else ? ) What should the above steps correspond to?

You need to use the steps in the repo instead of the steps on the docs if you're using enterprise server.

Honestly not a fan of Github docs.....I feel like the ones in the repo are much clearer and easier to understand/read.

Its pretty easy to set up honestly. Deploy this on your k8s cluster https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller and a runnerDeployment and youre good to go.

Trying to use the Actions Runner Controller (https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller) to utilize self-hosted runners. I keep getting this error on the controller.

I'm convinced one of (or a combination) of things is happening here in regards to authentication. This GH enterprise account is configured with SAML. I feel like that is a valid data point. I'm using https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller as a reference guide for what I should be doing. I suspect whoever is Owner of this organization has modified what I can do as a user. The steps in the doc where I can actually Install the Application isn't available to me. When configuring the GitHub App I'm given two options. I select the option for "this account only" knowing the documentation says it is possible to use this Github App with a repo in the Organization as long as I have Admin privileges or I'm the owner.

External-Secrets Operator : A Kubernetes operator that integrates external secret management systems like AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, Google Secrets Manager, and many more. The operator reads information from external APIs and automatically injects the values into a Kubernetes Secret (Alternatives : Vault, SOPS, Sealed Secrets)

I like sealed secrets (https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets) a lot. It's like 1Password, but for apps in kubernetes. You only need to secure a private key, and can throw encrypted secrets in a public github repo or anywhere you want.

It's owned by VMware (Broadcom) now, so you have to decide which company you hate more.

If you have noticed, you are setting secrets in plain text on the application-configmap.yml file, which is not ideal and is not a best practice for security. The best way to do this securely would be to use AWS Secrets Manager, an external service like HashiCorp Vault, or Sealed Secrets. To learn more about these methods see the blog post Shhhh... Kubernetes Secrets Are Not Really Secret!.

Yeah documentation is hard and I'm guilty (as a former maintainer of SealedSecrets)

SealedSecrets was designed with "write only" secrets in mind.

Turns out a lot of people need to access the current secrets because they need to update a part of a "composite" secret.

There are two kinds of "composite" secrets, one easy and one harder, but if you don't know how to do it, even the easier is hard:

1. Secret with multiple data "items" (also called keys in K8s Secret jargon but that's confusing when there is encryption involved). I.e. good old "data":{"foo": "....", "bar": "..."}

2. Secrets where data within one item is actually a config file with cleartext and secrets mixed up in one single string (usually some JSON or YAML or TOML)

Case 1 is "easy" to deal with once you realize that sealed secrets files are just text files and you can just manually merge and update encryoted data items. We even created a "merge" and some "raw" encryption APIs to make that process a little less "copy pasta" but it's still hard to have a good UX that works for everyone.

Case 2 is harder. We did implement a data templating feature that allows you to generate a config file via a go-template that keeps the cleartext parts in clear and uses templating directives to inject the secret parts where you want (referencing the encrypted the items)

The main problem with case 2 is that it's undocumented.

The feature landed in 2021:

https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets/pull/580

I noticed that people at my current $dayjob used sealed secrets for years and it took me a while to understand that the reason they hated it was that they didn't know about that fundamental feature.

And how to blame them!? It's still undocumented!

In my defense I spent so much effort before and after I left VMware to lobby so that the project got the necessary staffing so it wouldn't die of bitrot that I didn't have much time left to work on documentation. Which is a bit said and probably just an excuse :-)

That said, I'm happy that the project is alive and the current maintainers are taking care of it against the forces of entropy. Perhaps some doc work would be useful too. Unfortunately I don't have time for now.

This might be OT, and forgive me, but I think one of the best practices for Encrypting and Managing secrets in Kubernetes is to use Sealed Secrets, they allow your secrets to be securely stored in git with the rest of the configuration and yet no one with access to the Git repository will be able to read them. I say this might be OT, because Sealed Secrets are trying to mitigate a different threat, the threat of the secrets at rest somewhere, and not "live in the cluster", where in theory all the ingredients to decrypt the secrets would still live.

The addition of Consul and Vault gives me a few things. For one, right now I'm handling secrets with a mixture of SOPS and Sealed Secrets. I use Vault in my professional life, and have used both Vault and Consul at my last job. Vault is a beast, so I may as well get better at it; plus its options for secret injection are better.

Use Sealed Secrets Operator.

sealed-secrets (sealed)