A Simple Approach for Injecting Secrets Into EKS

At Galley Solutions, we recently moved from Heroku to containers hosted on Amazon Web Service’s EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service).

At Galley Solutions, we recently moved from Heroku to containers hosted on Amazon Web Service’s EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service). During this transition, we kept our first iteration of Kubernetes simple in order to enable Galley to run while moving us toward future growth and overall product expansion. We solved many issues throughout the process, but I chose to write about this specific issue because It was more difficult to find resources about. Shout out to my pair programming partner Taylor Johndrew for brainstorming this solution with me. Let’s first start on the why…

The main goals of the project were to keep standard Kubernetes base64 encoded secrets out of our git repo and to leverage AWS Secrets Manager. We found many different solutions in our research. Some findings were very heavy in their implementation but offered greater security. The solution we devised does not enable secrets encryption at rest in containers. An approach similar to this GitHub — APIServer encryption provider, backed by AWS KMS offers KMS encryption through a provider. Other approaches offered similar secrets hydration through providers (Secrets Manager being one of them) at the expense of added dependencies.

GoDaddy manages a package that appears to handle not just AWS Secrets Manager, but other providers as well… Kubernetes External Secrets — GoDaddy Engineering Blog. The External Secret yaml appeared to be clean and straightforward to implement. I envision Galley using this package, in the future, when we begin to manage a larger number of secrets.

Okay! On to the good stuff. The approach below is a fair game provided that you use EKS and you deploy to EKS through CodeBuild. Here is an overview:

Step 1 — Repository Code

• Let's create two templates to go in our repo that correspond to one of our services/pods… deployment.yaml and secret.yaml… keep in mind this doesn’t contain all the configuration for actually running EKS, just the pieces for secrets.

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