Hands-On Microservices with Kubernetes

Configuration and secrets

Secrets are credentials that are used to access databases and other services (internal and/or external). Technically, they are configuration data, but in practice, because of their sensitivity, they often need to be encrypted at rest and controlled more carefully. It is common to have secrets stored and managed separately from regular configurations.

In this chapter, we will consider only nonsensitive configuration. In the next chapter, we will discuss secrets in detail. Kubernetes also separates configuration from secrets at the API level.