I am new to K8s and trying to create a Helm chart to setup my application.
I want a frictionless experience for users setting up the application without much manual intervention.
Creating the helm chart i was pleased with the provided templating functionallity but missing one essential thing: Creating passwords.
I don't want the user to have to create the passwords for my API to talk to redis etc.
Setting up Vault is also one of the more difficult parts as its key has to be initially created it then needs to be unlocked and resources like userpass and other engines and resources have to be created.
For a docker-compose setup of the same app i have a "install container" that generates the passwords, creates resources on Vault with its API etc.
Is there another possibility using kubernetes/helm?
Thanks
You could try Sealed Secrets. It stores secrets encrypted using assimetric keys, so they secrets can be only restored having the proper keys.
Related
We are trying to create an environment using crossplane and argocd. Once Crossplane generates the database and saves the credentials to a secret on the management cluster. After we are deploying the credentials from management cluster to our destination cluster to a secret.
Now we need to pass the credentials from secret a to secret B which the application knows about. The issue starts when argo do not use helm install but template thus lookup function don't work. We thought about using vault as a middle man but we are not sure how to load values from secret to vault.
Anyway if you encounter such an issue or have some sort of a solution we'll be very happy to hear.
Thank you
You need to commit the (encrypted) secrets somewhere for ArgoCD to pick them up. That is the whole point of GitOps.
Alternatively you can try using https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user-guide/parameters/ but this is considered a temporary workaround
I have a couple Charts which all need access to the same Kubernetes Secret. My initial plan was to create a Chart just for those Secrets but it seems Helm doesn't like that. I am thinking this must be a common problem and am wondering what folks generally do to solve this problem?
Thanks!
Best practice is, don't save any sensitive secrets in kubernetes clusters. kubernetes secret is encode, not encrypt.
You can reference the secret via aws ssm/secrets manager, hashicorp Vault or other similars.
https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-workshop-for-kubernetes/tree/master/04-path-security-and-networking/401-configmaps-and-secrets
Most charts that follow the common chart development practices allow you to use an existing secret instead of creating one for you. This way, you can create your common secrets normally (without helm), and refer to them from the charts that need them, via a reference like existingSecret config key.
Take minio helm chart for example: it accepts an existingSecret key as an alternative to passing an accessKey and a secretKey.
As you can see in the main charts repo, this is a pretty common practice.
I have a requirement where my client applications are having almost same properties and even the URL is same, as they are running behind a load balancer, the only change they have is a particular set of environment properties that differ.
Is it possible to register them uniquely based on that property.
I would say there are a few approaches.
One would be loading Environment Variables from a Kubernetes Secret.
Second using helm(https://helm.sh/)
Helm helps you manage Kubernetes applications — Helm Charts help you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application.
Charts are easy to create, version, share, and publish — so start using Helm and stop the copy-and-paste.
Explanation:
If you would use a secret option, you would probably create two separate secrets with env variables that you need and load those based on the app name, or if you have them setup in different namespaces then copy the secret over to each as those resources will not work between different namespaces.
If you would use helm, you will have to write your chart and put the env variables into values.yaml or mix it together and load secret from inside Kubernetes.
This will work on Kubernetes, I do not know (based on your tags) if it's the same on OpenShift.
Please provide some samples of what you have already done and I'll provide more details.
I would like to use a Secret inside a ConfigMap. Is this possible?
Example:
An example where this might be required is if you would like to write from Fluentd to S3. In the configuration you have to add your AWS credentials.
Alternatives:
Using environment variables on the cluster itself. I do not like this idea, because the variable would still contain the secret as plain text.
Passing the password during set-up. If you are using deployment tools it might be possible to pass the secret during the deployment of your application. This is also not a nice solution since you are still passing the secret as plain text to the deployment tool. An advantage of this approach is that you do not accidentally check-in your secret to git.
Try to avoid making use of aws credentials in kubernetes.
As you can see aws_key_id and aws_sec_key are the optional fields.
Make use of AWS IAM role and assign it to the kubernetes nodes.
And then try to run your fluentd application without aws credentials in its config.
Just give it a try.
Hope this helps.
Update:
This article explain different ways to use aws iam for kubernetes.
Kube2iam and many other tools like this, might help. Give it a try.
No, it is not possible. You should always use secret for your sensitive data.
By default, secrets are only base64 encoded content of files so you should use something like Vault to secure store you sensitive data.
I am trying to use Helm charts to install applications in Kubernetes clusters. Can someone please suggest what could be a better solution to manage secrets? Using helm secrets would be a good idea or Hashicorp Vault?
Vault is technically awesome, but it can be an administrative burden. You can get strong protection of "secrets", whatever they may be; you can avoid ever sharing magic secrets like the your central database password by generating single-use passwords; if you need something signed or encrypted, you can ask Vault to do that for you and avoid ever having to know the cryptographic secret yourself. The big downsides are that it's a separate service to manage, getting secrets out of it is not totally seamless, and you occasionally need to have an administrator party to unseal it if you need to restart the server.
Kubernetes secrets are really just ConfigMaps with a different name. With default settings it's very easy for an operator to get out the value of a Secret (kubectl get secret ... -o yaml, then base64 decode the strings), so they're not actually that secret. If you have an interesting namespace setup, you generally can't access a Secret in a different namespace, which could mean being forced to copy around Secrets a lot. Using only native tools like kubectl to manage Secrets is also a little clumsy.
Pushing credentials in via Helm is probably the most seamless path – it's very easy to convert from a Helm value to a Secret object to push into a container, and very easy to push in values from somewhere like a CI system – but also the least secure. In addition to being able to dump out the values via kubectl you can also helm get values on a Helm release to find out the values.
So it's a question of how important keeping your secrets really secret is, and how much effort you want to put in. If you want seamless integration and can limit access to your cluster to authorized operators and effectively use RBAC, a Helm value might be good enough. If you can invest in the technically best and also most complex solution and you want some of its advanced capabilities, Vault works well. Maintaining a plain Kubernetes secret is kind of a middle ground, it's a little more secure than using Helm but not nearly as manageable.