Simplify Kubernetes Secrets Management with Doppler

Are you struggling with managing, sharing, and securing your organization’s Kubernetes secrets?

Are you guilty of hardcoding your Kubernetes secrets? No, don’t! Using secrets that are hardcoded or stored in repositories is not only tedious, but managing secrets insecurely can lead to security risks, decreased efficiency, and unwanted exposure of sensitive data.

Of course, we know, like many necessary practices in keeping information secure, keeping secrets a secret is easier said than done. So if you shouldn’t hardcode secrets, but manually rotating and provisioning them isn’t scalable, how do you manage secrets securely?

In this post, we’ll explore the benefits of using Doppler for managing Kubernetes secrets and how to address the most common challenges.

The challenges of Kubernetes secrets management

Storing, sharing, and securing Kubernetes secrets can be a complex task that often requires manual effort, training, and significant time investments from DevOps teams. Organizations frequently experience challenges such as:

• Ensuring secrets are stored securely in transit and at rest
• Establishing proper access and authorization controls
• Keeping a detailed audit trail of changes made to secrets
• Updating secrets promptly

These challenges can cause significant security concerns when handling sensitive data while also impacting overall productivity. The good news is that Doppler provides a hassle-free way to manage secrets with granular access control, audit logging, and auto-updating.

Do you know your organization’s secrets management process?

Before we review how you can easily manage your organization’s Kubernetes secrets, it’s important to do some self-reflection. Consider what your current processes are and how they can be improved:

• How does your organization manage its Kubernetes secrets, and how manual is the process?
• Do you have a clear audit trail for the secrets you store, and is it easy to discern who made which changes?
• How granular is your organization's access control over secrets?
• Are your current secrets management practices exposing your organization to security risks and can you mitigate them easily?

Getting clarity to know what your organization needs—and the reality of what is in place (or lacking)—is the first step to identifying how to keep your secrets secure.

The benefits of using Doppler for Kubernetes secrets management

Now that you’re knowledgeable about your organization’s security posture, you can start integrating tools and processes to secure your secrets. This is where Doppler comes in!

Doppler provides an integrated solution to overcome the challenges of Kubernetes secrets management. Here are a few features making Doppler the easiest and most secure platform to manage your organization’s secrets:

Centralized secrets management

Doppler provides a single interface to store, manage, and deploy secrets across various Kubernetes environments. This means that secrets management becomes streamlined across your organization—this means that your team can devote valuable time to other tasks.

Strong security and access controls

Doppler ensures that your secrets are secure with automatic encryption and granular access control. You can define rules that restrict access to specific environments, secrets, or teams. Teams usually need direct access to K8s clusters, but with Doppler, you only need to set up the operator for provisioned users to manage secrets. Now those secrets are magically available when you’re ready to deploy. And just like that, you're ready to deploy without compromising required access controls.

Secrets updated automatically

Doppler automates the distribution of secrets, ensuring that your applications always have access to the latest values. Whenever secrets are updated in Doppler, the operator automatically syncs the secrets to your cluster.

Audit logging

Doppler maintains an audit trail for all secret operations, making it easy to track who changed what, when, and where. With audit logging, organizations can maintain detailed information on any changes made to the secrets, ensuring accountability and transparency.

What types of Kubernetes secrets can be used in Doppler?

Here are some examples of Kubernetes secrets that can be used in Doppler:

• Database credentials: You can create a secret within Doppler containing the database credentials which can be used by an application pod to access the database.
• API keys: You can store and manage API keys for services like Stripe, Twilio, or SendGrid to authenticate API calls made from your pods.
  

With Doppler's integration with K8s, you can easily manage secrets within your environment.

Learn more about integrating with K8s >

Start managing Kubernetes secrets with Doppler

Doppler simplifies managing your Kubernetes secrets, saving time and resources while ensuring your secrets remain secret. So how do you get started?

Integrating Doppler with Kubernetes is simple, and can be done in two ways; manually or automatically.

Automatic integration

When you connect your Kubernetes cluster to Doppler, our integration automatically synchronizes your app secrets with your cluster's configuration. This ensures that your Kubernetes secrets are always up to date.

Manual integration

If you prefer to have more control over the process, you can also use Doppler's CLI tool to pull secrets into your Kubernetes containers. The process is simple, and can be automated using GitLab CI or similar tools.

Check out our Get Started Guide for an overview and next steps >

K8s + Doppler = Harmony

With Doppler’s robust features and simple interface, you can immediately secure your organization's secrets while minimizing the risk of exposing sensitive data.

Try Doppler and experience how easily you can manage ALL your secrets >