terraform-aws-vpc VS sealed-secrets

In the terraform block we have to specify a path to a Terraform module. For example, in this case, we use the VPC module from the terraform-aws-modules open source project. We don't necessarily need to rely on other people's code, we can use modules maintained by ourselves by providing a link to a remote Git repository, or we can even have it point to a local path on our drive.

ECR VPC ECS

Now let us move on to the important part of the tutorial. Creating an EKS cluster in AWS is not as straightforward as in other cloud platforms. You need to also create a lot more resources for everything to work correctly without surprises. You will be using a bunch of Terraform providers to help with this, and you will also use some prebuilt Terraform modules like AWS VPC Terraform module and Amazon EKS Blueprints for Terraform to reduce the amount of boilerplate you need to write.

The infrastructure is created using terraform, and can be found in this git repository. The project uses community maintained AWS Terraform modules, which simplify this process. The code examples that follow in the post are using the vpc-endpoints module to create the Gateway and interface endpoints.

Let us use an example from AWS to see how we can use a publicly available module. When setting up a virtual network (or Virtual Private Cloud, VPC) in AWS there are a lot of resources you must create. One popular module is the AWS VPC module. The documentation for this module is available at registry.terraform.io/modules/terraform-aws-modules/vpc/aws. The simplest example of using this module looks like this:

locals { region = data.aws_region.current.name } module "vpc" { source = "git::https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-vpc.git?ref=v3.16.0" name = var.vpc_name cidr = var.vpc_cidr azs = ["${local.region}a", "${local.region}b"] public_subnets = cidrsubnets(var.vpc_cidr, 1, 1) enable_dns_hostnames = true enable_dns_support = true map_public_ip_on_launch = true tags = { Name = var.vpc_name } public_subnet_tags = { Name = "public subnet" "kubernetes.io/role/elb" = "1" "kubernetes.io/cluster/${var.cluster_name}" = "shared" } }

/u/akirakotkata all of the answers in this thread are correct, but nobody's empowered you to figure this out on your own in the future. In the registry link you provided, there's a link to Source Code. Follow that link and take a look at variables.tf in the repo, lines 13-17. That block is what is expected for the parameter, so you need to tweak what you're sending into what it expects.

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)