sops VS vault-secrets-operator

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

To add to this, if you want to store sensitive information in git, I recommend using Mozilla SOPS in conjunction with some key story (e.g., AWS KMS). You can decode SOPS files directly from terraform if I'm not mistaken.

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.

It looks like the software you're intending to use is oriented towards interacting with desktop Linux's keyring. While you can probably get this to work, I would recommend using something like sops as it's a more standardized way of storing secrets in configuration.

For home use, I wouldn't bother with Vault unless that's really what you want to learn. Then it's worth looking into setting something up where you could use vault secrets, using one of the available options (I haven't seen the vault-secrets-operator being mentioned).

It is but it affects vault-secrets-operator too, see https://github.com/ricoberger/vault-secrets-operator/issues/104 (and no, I’ve only use vault-secrets-operator)

What you’re looking for is https://github.com/ricoberger/vault-secrets-operator

If you are using an external KMS in any case, then there are other options, such as the kubernetes-external-secrets operator that was originally started by GoDaddy and the externalsecret-operator from Container Solutions. If you use HashiCorp Vault, you also have the option of using the Vault Secrets operator. This works similarly to the Sealed Secrets Operator, but instead of managing its own key material, it retrieves the secrets from Vault. The CNCF Technology Radar from January 2021 provides an overview of the types of tools that are available for secrets management.