Using managed identities in Azure is recommended when you’re connecting to other Azure services (and even your own services if you’re implementing authentication). In the Kubernetes world, Microsoft has maintained an open-source project called AAD-pod-identity. Recently, a managed and supported version of AAD pod identity for AKS was released in public preview. In this post, […]
Category: Security

Setting up a Private Link service as a service provider
Azure Private Link allows you to connect to public services over a private connection. I have already written about using Private Link with blob and the Azure Kubernetes Service. You can also use Private Link to expose your own custom services, and act as a service provider. This means you would build a service in […]

Accessing Key Vault Secrets in Kubernetes using the Key Vault CSI driver
When you store secrets in a Kubernetes cluster, by default those are stored in the etcd database within the master nodes. The same is true for secrets stored in an AKS cluster on Azure. The best practice for storing secrets is to store your secrets in KeyVault. Up to now, there was an opensource project […]

Don’t use environment variables in Kubernetes to consume secrets
Managing secrets is a complicated endeavor. Kubernetes has a native secrets implementation, that allows you to store and access secrets from your deployments. A while ago, I read a short free book on Kubernetes Security, by Liz Rice and Michael Hausenblas (apparently O’Reilly calls it a report, but I actually have a hard copy that […]