sealed-secrets VS helm

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)

Applying Kubernetes manifests individually is problematic because files can get overlooked. Packaging your applications as Helm charts lets you version your manifests and easily repeat deployments into different environments. Helm tracks the state of each deployment as a "release" in your cluster.

helm

Explanation here: https://github.com/helm/helm/issues/12681#issuecomment-19593...

Looks like it's a bug in Helm, but actually isn't Helm's fault, the issue was introduced by Fedora Linux.

Helm (Get from here https://helm.sh/)

It’s also well understood that having a k8s cluster is not enough to make developers able to host their services - you need a devops team to work with them, using tools like delivery pipelines, Helm, kustomize, infra as code, service mesh, ingress, secrets management, key management - the list goes on! Developer Portals like Backstage, Port and Cortex have started to emerge to help manage some of this complexity.

Kubernetes orchestrates deployments and manages resources through yaml configuration files. While Kubernetes supports a wide array of resources and configurations, our aim in this tutorial is to maintain simplicity. For the sake of clarity and ease of understanding, we will use yaml configurations with hardcoded values. This method simplifies the learning process but isn’t ideal for production environments due to the need for manual updates with each new deployment. Although there are methods to streamline and automate this process, such as using Helm charts or bash scripts, we’ll not delve into those techniques to keep the tutorial manageable and avoid fatigue — you might be quite tired by that point!

Helm is a package manager that automates Kubernetes applications' creation, packaging, configuration, and deployment by combining your configuration files into a single reusable package. This eliminates the requirement to create the mentioned Kubernetes resources by ourselves since they have been implemented within the Helm chart. All we need to do is configure it as needed to match our requirements. From the public Helm chart repository, we can get the charts for common software packages like Consul, Jenkins SonarQube, etc. We can also create our own Helm charts for our custom applications so that we don’t need to repeat ourselves and simplify deployments.

We can search for charts https://helm.sh/ . Charts can be pulled(downloaded) and optionally unpacked(untar).

Generally I felt as if I was diving in the deepest of waters without the correct equipement and that was horrifying. Unfortunately to me, I had to dive even deeper before getting equiped with tools like ArgoCD, and k8slens. I had to start working with... HELM.

Within the architecture of Cyclops, a central component is the Helm engine. Helm is very popular within the Kubernetes community; chances are you have already run into it. The popularity of Helm plays to Cyclops's strength because of its straightforward integration.