Popular Secret Management tools for Kubernetes workloads in 2022
Popular Secret Management tools for Kubernetes workloads in 2022
Most developers have globally embraced container orchestrators like Kubernetes in their efforts to automate crucial tasks such as deployment, scaling, and operating application containers across clusters of hosts. Kubernetes facilitates running immutable infrastructure where containers can be destroyed, replaced, and self-healed automatically.
Kubernetes has also come a long way since its inception a few years ago, but Kubernetes Security is an aspect that has always lagged behind performance and has been a challenge. To build secure and reliable applications, modern-day organizations often need to maintain proper encryption and protection of sensitive data or secrets residing inside the Kubernetes cluster.
The security issues inherent in Kubernetes have led to the development of alternative approaches that allow for more robust yet flexible security via third-party secret management tools. Both commercial and open source solutions are available, leveraging different approaches to handle secrets calling for a different set of tools or practices instead of leveraging the native Kubernetes way to manage secrets.
Now secrets include everything from passwords, APIs, encryption keys, SSH keys, tokens, to other digital credentials that allow users and applications access to sensitive data, systems, and services. This is why it’s so important to keep secrets safe while they’re in transit and at rest, as well as to handle them securely.
Today we are going to look at some of the popular Secrets management tools in the market, that can be leveraged with Kubernetes for secret management.
1. HashiCorp Vault: it is a free and open-source tool that secures, stores, and tightly controls access to tokens, certificates, API keys, sensitive credentials, and other secrets. Hashicorp Vault provides a unilateral interface to manage secrets across infrastructures. Users can create detailed audit logs, which can help keep an eye on who accessed what. It can also be used to authenticate users (machines/humans) either via traditional methods (like using passwords) or by using modern methods (like exchanging dynamic values) to generate temporary tokens to access a particular path. Haschicorp vault is one of the most popular and preferred secret management tools when it comes to third-party solutions.
2. Akeyless: Akeyless Vault is a centralised secrets management platform for managing and protecting all forms of Secrets offering a plugin for integration with Kubernetes. It uses the Kubernetes Mutating Admission Webhook to inject secrets into pods, with the init sidecar container fetching the secret before the application starts. Some of the key features include: Offers segregation between different Kubernetes clusters and their secrets,Access to Akeyless can be maintained using SSO,and AWS IAM), Supports multiple options to authenticatication to Kubernetes clusters (API Key,Azure Active Directory,LDAP,Open ID,SAML.
3. CyberArk Conjur: Cyberark Secrets Manager is a Kubernetes secrets and credential management solution for cloud-native hybrid and containerized environments. It can help remove the hard-coded secrets from the source code and other Devops tools. It provides centralized secure management of secrets and credentials for a wide range of application workloads, including automation platforms, CI/CD tools, and commercial off-the-shelf solutions (COTS). It allows developers to develop scalable applications having secure access to sensitive and high-value resources like databases.
4. AWS Secrets Manager: it is an AWS service that lets you quickly rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other passwords. Using Secrets Manager, you can secure, analyze, and manage secrets needed to access the AWS Cloud capabilities, on third-party services and on-premises.
5. Google Cloud Secrets Manager: Secret Manager is a service from Google Cloud to manage secrets on clusters. It offers a secure storage system for API keys, certificates, passwords, and other sensitive data. It gives a central place and single source to access, manage, and audit secrets across Google Cloud. It offers several features, such as secrets versioning, cloud IAM integration, and audit logging.
6. Azure Key Vault: Azure Key Vault is a Microsoft Azure service that allows users to store and use cryptographic keys. For high-value customer keys, Azure Key Vault offers a variety of key types and algorithms, as well as the use of Hardware Security Modules (HSM).
7. Trousseau: it is another open-source project for secret management. Secrets management can now be added to Kubernetes along with support for any key management encryption, starting with HashiCorp Vault. The Trousseau open source software is available here on GitHub. With Trousseau, any user/workload can leverage the native Kubernetes way to store and access secrets in a safe way by plugging into any KMS provider, like Hashicorp Vault (Community and Enterprise editions), using the Kubernetes KMS provider framework. No additional changes or new skills are required. It’s also possible to transition among Kubernetes platforms using the consistent Kubernetes API.
In addition to the above-mentioned tools, there are also a number of other open-source solutions to explore that allow you to encrypt a Kubernetes secret and store it in a Git repository, such as:
* Kamus (Kamus)
* Sealed Secrets (Sealed Secrets)
* Secrets OperationS (SOPS)