vault-secrets-operator

Edit on GitHub	/services/vault-secrets-operator
Type	Helm
Namespace	vault-secrets-operator

Overview

The vault-secrets-operator application is an installation of Vault Secrets Operator to retrieve necessary secrets from Vault and materialize them as Kubernetes secrets for the use of other applications. It processes VaultSecret resources defined in the Science Platform repository and creates corresponding Kubernetes Secret resources.

See DMTN-112 for the LSST Vault design.

Upgrading

Upgrading to newer upstream releases of the Helm chart is normally simple and straightforward. We have no significant local customization.

After upgrading, check that Vault Secrets Operator is still working properly by finding a VaultSecret and Secret resource pair in the Argo CD dashboard and deleting the Secret resource. It should be nearly immediately re-created from the VaultSecret resource by Vault Secrets Operator. The Gafaelfawr secret is a good one to use for this purpose since it is only read during Gafaelfawr start-up.

Bootstrapping the application

Vault Secrets Operator is the only component of the Science Platform whose secret has to be manually created, so that it can create the secrets for all other applications. This will be done automatically by the install script.

Its secret will look like this:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: vault-secrets-operator
  namespace: vault-secrets-operator
type: Opaque
stringData:
  VAULT_TOKEN: <token>
  VAULT_TOKEN_LEASE_DURATION: 86400

Replace <token> with the read Vault token for the path secret/k8s_operator/<cluster-name> in Vault. See DMTN-112 for more information.