Kubernetes: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. ConfigMaps and Secrets

It is a good practice to make container images as reusable as possible. The same image should be able to be used for development, staging, and production. It is even better if the same image is general-purpose enough to be used across applications and services. Testing and versioning get riskier and more complicated if images need to be recreated for each new environment. But then how do we specialize the use of that image at runtime?

This is where ConfigMaps and secrets come into play. ConfigMaps are used to provide configuration information for workloads. This can either be fine-grained information (a short string) or a composite value in the form of a file. Secrets are similar to ConfigMaps but focused on making sensitive information available to the workload. They can be used for things like credentials or TLS certificates.

ConfigMaps

One way to think of a ConfigMap is as a Kubernetes object that defines a small filesystem. Another way is as a set of variables that can be used when defining the environment or command line for your containers. The key thing is that the ConfigMap is combined with the Pod right before it is run. This means that the container image and the Pod definition itself can be reused across many apps by just changing the ConfigMap that is used.

Creating ConfigMaps

Let’s jump right in and create a ConfigMap. Like many objects in Kubernetes, you can create these in an immediate, imperative way, or you can create them ...