external-secrets VS krew

Something I personally like about EKS is the Amazon Controllers for Kubernetes nowadays they would more preoperly be called 'operators' like the (non AWS and non AWS specific) External Secrets Operator. Essentially you delegate your cluster to create external resources elsewhere on your behalf based on annotations in your deployment.

Vault is extremely complex and heavy for my tastes, and Bitwarden Secrets Manager implementation AFAIU is not open source and not suitable for self-hosting. I like that both can be easily integrated with External Secrets for kubernetes secrets management.

Store the Secrets in a vault like Hashicorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager, etc., and then use an operator like External Secrets Operator to add them to your K8s cluster.

External Secrets is an operator that integrates external KMS such as Hashicorp Vault or those of the major cloud providers. It reads secrets from the external APIs and injects them into Kubernetes secrets. The operator is a new implementation after the merge of similar projects from GoDaddy and ContainerSolutions.

I use Kubernetes-External-Secrets https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets with aws parameter store

Authenticating with Kyma is a (in my opinion) unnecessary challenge as it leverages the OIDC-login plugin for kubectl. You find a description of the setup here. This works fine when on a Mac but can give you some headaches on a Windows and on Linux machine especially when combined with restrictive setups in corporate environments. For Windows I can only recommend installing krew via chocolatey and then install the OIDC plugin via kubectl krew install oidc-login. At least for me that was the only way to get this working on Windows.

( set -x; cd "$(mktemp -d)" && OS="$(uname | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')" && ARCH="$(uname -m | sed -e 's/x86_64/amd64/' -e 's/\(arm\)\(64\)\?.*/\1\2/' -e 's/aarch64$/arm64/')" && KREW="krew-${OS}_${ARCH}" && curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/krew/releases/download/v0.4.4/krew-linux_amd64.tar.gz" && tar zxvf "${KREW}.tar.gz" && ./"${KREW}" install krew )

Krew is a way to manage plugins for Kubernetes. For more info, check out the following link: https://krew.sigs.k8s.io/

I plan on getting it added as a krew plugin, so watch this space.

Krew is a plugin manager maintained by the Kubernetes Special Interest Group (SIG) CLI community. Krew makes it easy to use kubectl plugins and helps you discover, install, and manage them on your machine. It is similar to tools like apt, dnf, or brew. Today, over 200 kubectl plugins are available on Krew - and that number is only increasing. Some projects are actively used and some get deprecated over time, but are still accessible via Krew.

kubectl plugins can be installed in numerous ways, the easiest way would be to install the official plugin manager called krew.

( set -x; cd "$(mktemp -d)" && OS="$(uname | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')" && ARCH="$(uname -m | sed -e 's/x86_64/amd64/' -e 's/\(arm\)\(64\)\?.*/\1\2/' -e 's/aarch64$/arm64/')" && KREW="krew-${OS}_${ARCH}" && curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/krew/releases/latest/download/${KREW}.tar.gz" && tar zxvf "${KREW}.tar.gz" && ./"${KREW}" install krew )

-- What is Krew?