berglas VS kubernetes-external-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 repo add external-secrets https://external-secrets.github.io/kubernetes-external-secrets/ "external-secrets" has been added to your repositories $ helm install k8s-external-secrets external-secrets/kubernetes-external-secrets -f values.yaml NAME: k8s-external-secrets LAST DEPLOYED: Wed Mar 23 22:50:35 2022 NAMESPACE: default STATUS: deployed REVISION: 1 TEST SUITE: None NOTES: The kubernetes external secrets has been installed. Check its status by running: $ kubectl --namespace default get pods -l "app.kubernetes.io/name=kubernetes-external-secrets,app.kubernetes.io/instance=k8s-external-secrets" Visit https://github.com/external-secrets/kubernetes-external-secrets for instructions on how to use kubernetes external secrets

I’m reading above that you weren’t aware of sealed-secrets. So I guess that you are not familiar with ExternalSecrets secrets neither. Very solid project

They probably should merge with https://github.com/external-secrets/kubernetes-external-secr...

I do not recommend vault if you are not experienced. It is a heavy infra to manage. I suggest looking into https://github.com/external-secrets/kubernetes-external-secrets and selecting the tool offered by your cloud providers.

This is where things like the vault agent sidecar or projects like external secrets come in and allow you to inject / sync your secrets backend and your Kubernetes workloads :)

Depending on what platform you are on, you could use the AWS SDK or a tool like external-secrets (for Kubernetes).

We don't keep anything sensitive inside of Helm charts. We use AWS Secrets Manager and external-secrets