Introduction to Sealed Secrets in Kubernetes

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

Sealed Secrets is an open-source tool by Bitnami for managing sensitive data securely in Kubernetes and other environments like Terraform. Instead of storing raw secrets in your Git repository, you encrypt them into “sealed” Secrets, which only the target cluster can decrypt.

In this lesson, we will:

  • Define Sealed Secrets and its primary use cases
  • Explore core components and workflow
  • Demonstrate a hands-on example to seal and unseal secrets

Note

You will need access to a running Kubernetes cluster and the kubeseal CLI installed locally.


What You’ll Learn

TopicDescription
Core ConceptsOverview of Sealed Secrets architecture and components
Workflow OverviewEncrypting, committing, and decrypting secrets
DemoCreating a Kubernetes Secret, sealing it, and applying it to a cluster
Integration with IaCUsing Sealed Secrets in Terraform and GitOps pipelines

Core Components Overview

Sealed Secrets relies on three main components:

  • SealedSecret custom resource for encrypted data
  • Controller that runs in-cluster to decrypt SealedSecrets into native Kubernetes Secrets
  • kubeseal CLI for encrypting Secret manifests outside the cluster

References

Watch Video

Watch video content