kubernetes-external-secrets VS sops

$ 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

My script just sets up default .sops.yaml for https://github.com/getsops/sops

You can further edit .sops.yaml(eg have multiple of them) and decide how you split secrets in your directory tree to further customize who can decrypt the secrets.

It works pretty well for prod/dev splits, etc

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.