secrets-store-csi-driver-provider-gcp VS external-secrets

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.

GCP SS-CSI driver

That's interesting actually, Google provides their own rpvider for the Secrets Store CSI Driver: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/secrets-store-csi-driver-provider-gcp

Consider: if you have a tool like terraform managing your infra components including your data layer, you likely want to manage those reaources in a different lifecycle from your application code. Applications may also likely managed using a different toolset (kubectl, helm, scaffold, etc.). In this case, secret Manager acts as the secure configuration bridge between the tools, keeping the secrets out of human hands. As certs and passwords are generated on the infra side, those values can be stored as secrets in SM. Application workloads - backed by service accounts having access to read the secret - can decrypt during launch and use the secret as needed. You can use common patterns in both GKE (via thesecrets store csi driver ) and Cloud Run for consuming secrets in this way.

I prefer https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/secrets-store-csi-driver-provider-gcp

Something I personally like about EKS is the Amazon Controllers for Kubernetes nowadays they would more preoperly be called 'operators' like the (non AWS and non AWS specific) External Secrets Operator. Essentially you delegate your cluster to create external resources elsewhere on your behalf based on annotations in your deployment.

Vault is extremely complex and heavy for my tastes, and Bitwarden Secrets Manager implementation AFAIU is not open source and not suitable for self-hosting. I like that both can be easily integrated with External Secrets for kubernetes secrets management.

Store the Secrets in a vault like Hashicorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager, etc., and then use an operator like External Secrets Operator to add them to your K8s cluster.

External Secrets is an operator that integrates external KMS such as Hashicorp Vault or those of the major cloud providers. It reads secrets from the external APIs and injects them into Kubernetes secrets. The operator is a new implementation after the merge of similar projects from GoDaddy and ContainerSolutions.

I use Kubernetes-External-Secrets https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets with aws parameter store