secrets-store-csi-driver-provider-azure VS k3d

The driver can also sync changes to secrets. The driver currently supports Vault, AWS, Azure, and GCP providers. Secrets Store CSI Driver can also sync provider secrets as Kubernetes secrets; if required, this behavior needs to be explicitly enabled during installation.

Azure SS-CSI driver

Azure Key Vault Provider for Secrets Store CSI Driver allows you to get secret contents stored in an Azure Key Vault instance and use the Secrets Store CSI driver interface to mount them into Kubernetes pods.

Key vault is a good Azure native option. Take look at the secret store CSI driver for Azure https://github.com/Azure/secrets-store-csi-driver-provider-azure

K3D: is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes designed for resource-constrained environments. It is an excellent option for running Kubernetes on virtual machines or cloud servers.

k3d is a lightweight wrapper that makes running Kubernetes (specifically, the lightweight k3s distribution) in Docker straightforward and efficient. It's designed to provide developers with a quick and easy way to test Kubernetes without the overhead of setting up a full cluster.

If you customer prefers to run the standard docker engine you could use k3d

You don’t need to run Rancher from a Kubernetes cluster, the rancher/rancher image works fine with Docker (it uses k3d, aka « k3s in docker » : https://k3d.io/).

K3d and Skaffold for local development

If you are a developer and want to learn how to deploy applications to a cluster, getting a cluster up an running can be a daunting task in it's own rights. There are many ways to do it: spinning up local virtual machines and configuring from scratch or using tools like minikube, etc. You may not care for the pain of setting up and configuring a cluster, and if that is you, then the quickest way that I have found is using k3d.