Exploring Secrets

Kubernetes secrets can be exposed to the Pods in different ways such as via environment variables and volumes.

Exposing Secrets as Environment Variables

You may expose the keys, namely, username and password, in the database-credentials Secret to a Pod as environment variables using a Pod manifest as shown (below):

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: someName
  namespace: someNamespace
spec:
  containers:
  - name: someContainer
    image: someImage
    env:
    - name: DATABASE_USER
      valueFrom:
        secretKeyRef:
          name: database-credentials
          key: username
    - name: DATABASE_PASSWORD
      valueFrom:
        secretKeyRef:
          name: database-credentials
          key: password

Exposing Secrets as Volumes

Secrets can also be mounted as data volumes on to a Pod and you can control the paths within the volume where the Secret keys are projected using a Pod manifest as shown (below):

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: someName
  namespace: someNamespace
spec:
  containers:
  - name: someContainer
    image: someImage
    volumeMounts:
    - name: secret-volume
      mountPath: "/etc/data"
      readOnly: true
  volumes:
  - name: secret-volume
    secret:
      secretName: database-credentials
      items:
      - key: username
        path: DATABASE_USER 
      - key: password
        path: DATABASE_PASSWORD

With the above Pod specification, the following will occur:

• value for the username key in the database-credentials Secret is stored in the file /etc/data/DATABASE_USER within the Pod
• value for the password key is stored in the file /etc/data/DATABASE_PASSWORD

Exploring the catalog Pod

The catalog deployment in the catalog Namespace accesses the following database values from the catalog-db secret via environment variables:

• DB_USER
• DB_PASSWORD

~$kubectl -n catalog get deployment catalog -o yaml | yq '.spec.template.spec.containers[] | .env'

- name: DB_USER

  valueFrom:

    secretKeyRef:

      key: username

      name: catalog-db

- name: DB_PASSWORD

  valueFrom:

    secretKeyRef:

      key: password

      name: catalog-db

- name: DB_NAME

  valueFrom:

    configMapKeyRef:

      key: name

      name: catalog

- name: DB_READ_ENDPOINT

  valueFrom:

    secretKeyRef:

      key: endpoint

      name: catalog-db

- name: DB_ENDPOINT

  valueFrom:

    secretKeyRef:

      key: endpoint

      name: catalog-db

Upon exploring the catalog-db Secret we can see that it is only encoded with base64 which can be easily decoded as follows hence making it difficult for the secrets manifests to be part of the GitOps workflow.

~/environment/eks-workshop/base-application/catalog/secrets.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: catalog-db
data:
  username: "Y2F0YWxvZ191c2Vy"
  password: "ZGVmYXVsdF9wYXNzd29yZA=="

~$kubectl -n catalog get secrets catalog-db --template {{.data.username}} | base64 -d

catalog_user%                                                                                                                                                                                                   

~$kubectl -n catalog get secrets catalog-db --template {{.data.password}} | base64 -d

default_password%