Secrets

Abstract

Sooner than later, a service will have to use one or more secrets to access other systems – whether it is an API key, a password, or something sensitive. In this chapter, you will learn what challenges the secrets impose on your applications and what are the bad practices that you have to stay away from. After a short introduction about what secret managers are and what benefits they bring to the table, you will learn how Dapr simplifies the retrieval of secrets with the Secrets building block. Next, you will learn what secret stores are supported and how you can access them by either referencing secrets right in the Dapr component manifests or by calling the Secrets API from your services. Later, you will see how easy it is to use Kubernetes Secrets and how to use Azure Key Vault if you want to back away from using solely relying on Kubernetes. To wrap up the chapter, I will show you how you can control the access of Dapr applications to secrets.