How is work with secrets organized in a Kubernetes cluster?

In Kubernetes, working with secrets is organized through the Secret object, which stores sensitive data (passwords, tokens, keys) in encrypted or base64-encoded form. Secrets can be created manually or automatically, and they are accessible to pods via mounting as files or through environment variables.

For security, it is recommended to:

• Use encryption of secrets at the etcd level.
• Restrict access to secrets via RBAC.
• Minimize the number of services that have access to secrets.

Example of creating a secret:

kubectl create secret generic my-secret --from-literal=password=supersecret

And using it in a Pod:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: secret-pod
spec:
  containers:
  - name: mycontainer
    image: myimage
    env:
    - name: PASSWORD
      valueFrom:
        secretKeyRef:
          name: my-secret
          key: password