external-secrets VS sops

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

Mozilla SOPS (Secrets OPerationS) is an open-source command-line tool for managing and storing secrets. It uses secure encryption methods to encrypt secrets at rest and decrypt them at runtime. SOPS supports a variety of key management systems, including AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, and PGP. It's particularly useful in a DevOps context where sensitive data like API keys, passwords, or certificates need to be securely managed and seamlessly integrated into application workflows.

Encrypted secrets thanks to SOPS and Age

We do the exact same thing to keep track of some credentials we use sops[1] and AWS KMS to separate credentials by sensitivity, then use the git differ to view the diffs between the encrypted secrets

Definitely not best practice security-wise, but it works well

[1] https://github.com/getsops/sops

For anyone new to SOPS like I was - https://github.com/getsops/sops

I've found this is largely solved by strictly separating plain config and secrets, and then having secrets pull from GCP secret manager / vault / whatever.

You can then commit all the config (including the secret identifiers) and it all just works so long as you're authenticated with your secret storage system.

We do this for the live configuration as well in line with Gitops and find it to work well.

If you don't want to use a cloud secret manager you can also use something like https://github.com/getsops/sops to commit the encrypted secrets safely

Basically, the simpler the better --just encrypt your secrets and check them in to version control.

We use SOPS[0] for this, and have found it to be pretty nice.

[0]: https://github.com/getsops/sops

The answer is that secrets shouldn't be stored in the git repo at all, but somewhere safe like a password manager or Mozilla's SOPS which people seem to love.

Unfortunately, the SOPS project is in some sort of a limbo state and there has been quite a long period with limited maintenance and unclear position from Mozilla. Despite the project being accepted into the CNCF, it's still unclear what will happen with it going forward.

It looks like the software you're intending to use is oriented towards interacting with desktop Linux's keyring. While you can probably get this to work, I would recommend using something like sops as it's a more standardized way of storing secrets in configuration.