kustomize-sops VS sops-secrets-operator

I maintain several open source projects, most notably:

Sparkmagic (https://github.com/jupyter-incubator/sparkmagic)

Sparkmagic provides jupyter magics and kernels for working with remote Spark clusters. It's used by thousands of developers and companies like Pinterest, Amazon, more!

I've been maintaining for the past few years and would love help!

KSOPS (https://github.com/viaduct-ai/kustomize-sops)

KSOPS, or kustomize-SOPS, is a kustomize KRM exec plugin for SOPS encrypted resources. KSOPS can be used to decrypt any Kubernetes resource, but is most commonly used to decrypt encrypted Kubernetes Secrets and ConfigMaps. As a kustomize plugin, KSOPS allows you to manage, build, and apply encrypted manifests the same way you manage the rest of your Kubernetes manifests.

KSOPS is the most popular kustomize plugin and I'd love help maintaining and improving it from out GitOps fanatics.

ArgoCD users would have to build container images with SOPS baked in using Helm chart extensions or Kustomize extensions. Flux allows configuring sops directly into the Flux manifests.

The common wisdom is to use something that reconciles in cluster (e.g. a CSI driver as recommended in AKS, or sealed secrets, or vault injector) or a kustomize plugin (like ksops, advantage of just rendering out standard secrets in the cluster itself)

We've considered this, but then went with argocd + ksops for the key agility.

Check out ksops from viaduct https://github.com/viaduct-ai/kustomize-sops

sops-secrets-operator (sops)

There is also a third-party sops-secrets operator available.

I have configured sops-secret-controller too, I'll be using that to manage my secrets. But my problem is that I don't know beforehand the value.

SOPS that was developed by Mozilla offers significantly more options, though at the expense of a more complex configuration. Here, the key material can come from the key management systems (KMS) of the major cloud providers, from your own HashiCorp Vault, or from configured PGP keys. SOPS itself does not contain an operator, but there are different ways to use it with GitOps. Flux v2 offers native support. There is also the helm-secrets plug-in, which can also be used in ArgoCD with the manual configuration. There is also a sops-secrets operator that has been developed by a third party.