argo-cd VS sealed-secrets

The code above will create the argocd Kubernetes namespace and deploy the latest stable manifest. If you would like to install a specific manifest, have a look here.

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how easy and fast it is to deploy Sveltos on an RKE2 cluster with the help of ArgoCD, register two RKE2 Cluster API (CAPI) clusters and create a ClusterProfile to deploy Prometheus and Grafana Helm charts down the managed CAPI clusters.

Argo CD

$version = (Invoke-RestMethod https://api.github.com/repos/argoproj/argo-cd/releases/latest).tag_name Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/releases/download/$version/argocd-windows-amd64.exe" -OutFile "argocd.exe"

This is cool - I can think of some projects that are amazing as first contributors, and others I can think of that are terrible.

One thing I think the tool doesn't address is why someone should contribute to a particular project. Having stars is interesting, and a proxy for at least historical activity, but also kind of useless here - take argoproj/argo-cd [1] as an example - 14.5k stars, with a backlog of 2.7k issues and an issue tracker that's a real mess.

Either way, I think this tool is neat for trying to gain some experience in a project purely based on language.

[1] https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3...

In our case, our team went ahead with Solution B, as that was the only solution present when the issue occurred. However, with the release of Argo CD 2.8.0 (released on August 7, 2023), things have changed - for the better :). Now, there are two ways to handle the sharding issue with the Argo CD Application Controller:

$ kubectl create namespace argocd //Next, let's apply the yaml configuration files for ArgoCd $ kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml //Now we can view the pods created in the ArgoCD namespace. $ kubectl get pods -n argocd //To interact with the API Server we need to deploy the CLI: $ curl --silent --location -o /usr/local/bin/argocd https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/releases/download/v2.4.7/argocd-linux-amd64 $ chmod +x /usr/local/bin/argocd //Expose argocd-server $ kubectl patch svc argocd-server -n argocd -p '{"spec": {"type": "LoadBalancer"}}' //Wait about 2 minutes for the LoadBalancer creation $ kubectl get svc -n argocd //Get pasword and decode it. $ kubectl get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret -n argocd -o yaml $ echo WXVpLUg2LWxoWjRkSHFmSA== | base64 --decode

From here, we can explore other developments and tutorials on Kubernetes, such as o11y or observability (PLG, ELK, ELF, TICK, Jaeger, Pyroscope), service mesh (Linkerd, Istio, NSM, Consul Connect, Cillium), and progressive delivery (ArgoCD, FluxCD, Spinnaker).

lol! Wham! Third choice! https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd

If you mean for each app, I don't think it's listed anywhere though you may find it in `repo-server` logs. Like so

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)