Kubernetes users can now bring Vault into their Kubernetes environment using the Vault Helm chart to manage secrets. The Vault Helm chart provides core Vault deployments in Kubernetes and enables you to express the secrets required by your applications in a declarative way.
The following guides on HashiCorp Learn demonstrate operating Vault in a variety of modes within Kubernetes:
Vault Installation on Minikube via Helm starts a highly-available (HA) Vault cluster with a Consul storage backend and Vault's Kubernetes authentication, and then launches a sample application that directly requests secrets through Vault API calls.
Injecting Secrets into Kubernetes Pods via Vault Helm Sidecar starts Vault in standalone mode and deploys several applications that define their secrets through the declarative annotations interface.
Mount Vault Secrets through Container Storage Interface Volume starts Vault in development mode and deploys an application that mounts an ephemeral volume that declaratively defines secrets.
Integrate a Kubernetes Cluster with an External Vault starts a Vault server external to the cluster and deploys applications that address it directly, address it through a service, and then leverage the declarative power of annotations.
These guides focus on the concepts while eschewing larger security concerns to increase the time-to-value in a learning environment. But when it comes time to take Vault to production these reference guides describe how to do it securely and competently:
HCP Vault Radar conducts ongoing reconnaissance of unsecured secrets stored as plain text in code repositories as well as configuration, DevOps, and collaboration tools.
Secrets sync is a new feature in HashiCorp Vault that facilitates centralized management, governance, and control of secrets for multiple external secret managers.
A recap of HashiCorp infrastructure and security news and developments from Google Cloud Next, from scaling infrastructure as code to fighting secrets sprawl and more.