berglas VS helm-secrets

Secret Manager: secure storage for sensitive data e.g passwords.

Google Secret Manager

API keys are easy to "leak" or compromise, so best to not only use the restrictions presented to you when you create them but physically protect them as well. Don't code them in plain-text, don't check them into GitHub, etc. Store them in a secure database or use a service like GCP Secret Manager.

I've been looking at Google Secret Manager which sounds promising but I've not been able to find any examples or tutorials that help with the actual practical details of best practice or getting this working. I'm currently reading about Cloud Functions which also sound promising but again, I'm just going deeper and deeper into GCP without feeling like I'm gaining any useful insights.

In this post, I described how to build secure GitHub Actions workflows by pull_request_target event instead of pull_request event. Using pull_request_target, you can prevent malicious codes from being executed in CI. And by managing secrets in secrets management services such as AWS Secrets Manager and Google Secret Manager and access them via OIDC, you can restrict the access to secrets securely. To migrate pull_request to pull_request_target, several modifications are needed. And pull_request_target has a drawback that it's difficult to test changes of workflows, so it's good to introduce pull_request_target to repositories that require strong permissions in CI. For example, a Terraform Monorepo tends to require strong permissions for CI, so it's good to introduce pull_request_target to it.

If you want to make these secrets more secure and get versioning and access logs for them, you may want to switch to Secret Manager later on. They can still be exposed as environment variables to your code. It's a little more setup work, so start with the simple approach at the top.

https://cloud.google.com/secret-manager https://aws.amazon.com/secrets-manager/

helm plugin install https://github.com/databus23/helm-diff helm plugin install https://github.com/aslafy-z/helm-git helm plugin install https://github.com/jkroepke/helm-secrets

I use Helm secrets which integrates Mozilla Sops to handle secrets in my Helm charts.

Use Helm Secrets.

ArgoCD users would have to build container images with SOPS baked in using Helm chart extensions or Kustomize extensions. Flux allows configuring sops directly into the Flux manifests.

There is also the helm secrets plugin, which can also be used in ArgoCD with manual configuration.

Not sure if this is applicable for your use case, but you could use helm-secrets to fetch remote value files from https or git: https://github.com/jkroepke/helm-secrets/wiki/Values

$ helm plugin install https://github.com/jkroepke/helm-secrets --version v3.14.0

https://github.com/jkroepke/helm-secrets powered by sops

SOPS is great, and there are a lot of GitOps tools that either integrate with SOPS directly or make it relatively painless to integrate into your workflow, e.g. helm-secrets.

SOPS and helm-secrets: https://github.com/jkroepke/helm-secrets