External Secrets Operator 0.11: Secret Management Evolution

Introduction

External Secrets Operator 0.11, released on August 10, 2024, advances secret management with improved secret synchronization, enhanced provider support, better performance, and expanded integration capabilities. This release makes External Secrets Operator more powerful for managing secrets.

Secret Synchronization

• Sync performance improvements reduce time to sync secrets.
• Selective sync capabilities enable syncing specific secrets.
• Namespace filtering enables syncing secrets to specific namespaces.
• Refresh improvements enable automatic secret refresh.

Provider Support

1. Cloud provider enhancements provide better integration with AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, and GCP Secret Manager.
2. HashiCorp Vault improvements enable better Vault integration.
3. Provider expansion supports more secret providers.
4. Custom provider support enables integration with custom secret stores.

Performance Optimizations

• Reconciliation optimizations reduce time to sync secrets.
• Resource usage optimizations reduce CPU and memory consumption.
• Caching improvements provide better response times.
• Scaling improvements enable better handling of large numbers of secrets.

Integration Capabilities

• Kubernetes integration improvements provide seamless integration with Kubernetes.
• RBAC integration enables better access control.
• Monitoring integration provides visibility into secret operations.
• API improvements enable better programmatic access to External Secrets Operator capabilities.

Getting Started

# Install External Secrets Operator
helm repo add external-secrets https://charts.external-secrets.io
helm install external-secrets external-secrets/external-secrets -n external-secrets-system --create-namespace

Create a SecretStore:

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1beta1
kind: SecretStore
metadata:
  name: aws-secrets
spec:
  provider:
    aws:
      service: SecretsManager
      region: us-east-1
      auth:
        jwt:
          serviceAccountRef:
            name: external-secrets-sa

Summary

External Secrets Operator 0.11 continues to evolve as a leading secret management solution, providing teams with powerful capabilities for managing secrets.