flux2 VS sealed-secrets

Given the team had already adopted GitOps and were familiar with deployments powered by Helm Releases and Flux, we wanted to move the provisioning of the infrastructure to be part of the same process of creating the service and its continuous deployment.

Your GitHub action can trigger a helm chart, or series thereof, or other infra tools. Declarative specifications, triggered procedurally with the context of the branch’s latest build. We use this pattern quite extensively for preview app workflows.

As of a year ago this is possible in a fully declarative way with Flux 2, but there’s a lot more moving parts and security footguns - and the idea that the maintenance of this project has lost one of its primary sponsors is worrying at best.

https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/831

https://blog.kluctl.io/introducing-the-template-controller-a...

FluxCD - FluxCD is another popular GitOps tool that allows developers to use a Git repository as the sole source of configuration. Flux automatically ensures that the state of the Kubernetes cluster is synchronized with the configuration in the Git repository. It supports automatic updates, meaning Flux can monitor Docker image repositories for new images and push updates to the cluster.

#!/bin/bash aws eks update-kubeconfig --name $CLUSTER_NAME --region $AWS_REGION flux_installed=$(kubectl api-resources | grep flux) if [ -z "$flux_installed" ]; then echo "flux is not installed" curl -s https://fluxcd.io/install.sh | sudo bash flux bootstrap github \ --owner=$GH_USER_NAME \ --repository=$FLUX_REPO_NAME \ --path="clusters/$ENVIRONMENT/$CLUSTER_NAME/bootstrap" \ --branch=main \ --personal else echo "flux is installed" fi

Flux CD enables continuous deployment to Kubernetes through GitOps by syncing Git repositories with Kubernetes clusters. Flux CD enables GitOps for Kubernetes through source control integration. It manages Kubernetes manifests as code and syncs git repo changes to clusters. Flux automates checks, deployments, and updates within clusters.

FluxCD is a GitOps tool developed by Weaveworks that allows you to implement continuous and progressive delivery of your applications on Kubernetes. It is a CNCF graduated project that offers a set of controllers to monitor Git repositories and reconciles the cluster's actual state with the desired state defined by manifests committed in the repo.

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).

Instead, we will create a single long-lived cluster, and deploy our application in different namespaces. There are a bunch of ways to do that - see ArgoCD, Flux, custom internal tooling, or other solutions (we use our own product). That way, we:

One is to make sure configurations in both clusters is same. And for that there are many tools like fluxcd or projectsveltos

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)