Using Sealed Secrets in a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes Cluster

Sealed Secrets is a bitnami Kubernetes operator aimed to one-way encrypt secrets into sealed secrets so that they can be safely checked-in into GitHub or other VCS. It’s rather easy to install and use Sealed Secrets in a Kubernetes cluster on AMD64 architecture, but not so on my Raspberry Pi cluster.

First, the container image for the sealed-secrets-controller wasn’t built for ARM architecture. I managed to build it in my Raspberry Pi 2 with following commands:

git clone https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets.git
cd sealed-secrets
# golang build tools are needed here
make controller.image
# you can tag it to your docker registry instead of mine
docker tag quay.io/bitnami/sealed-secrets-controller:latest raynix/sealed-secrets-controller-arm:latest
docker push raynix/sealed-secrets-controller-arm

The next step is to use kustomize to override the default sealed-secrets deployment schema to use my newly built container image that runs on ARM

# kustomization.yaml
# controller.yaml is from https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets/releases/download/v0.9.7/controller.yaml
apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization

namespace: sealed-secrets
images:
  - name: quay.io/bitnami/sealed-secrets-controller
    newName: raynix/sealed-secrets-controller-arm
    newTag: latest
patchesStrategicMerge:
  - patch.yaml

resources:
  - controller.yaml
  - ns.yaml

# ns.yaml
# I'd like to install the controller into its own namespace
apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: sealed-secrets

# patch.yaml
# apparently the controller running on Raspberry Pi 4 needs more time to initialize
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: sealed-secrets-controller
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: sealed-secrets-controller
          readinessProbe:
            initialDelaySeconds: 100

Then the controller can be deployed with command kubectl apply -k .

The CLI installation is much easier on a Linux laptop. After kubeseal is installed. The public key used to encrypt secrets can be obtained from the controller deployed above. Since I installed the controller in it’s own namespace sealed-secrets instead of the default kube-system the command to encrypt secrets is a bit different:

kubectl create secret generic test-secret --from-literal=username=admin --from-literal=password=password --dry-run -o yaml | \
  kubeseal --controller-namespace=sealed-secrets -o yaml > sealed-secrets.yaml

Then the generated file sealed-secrets.yaml can be deploy with kubectl apply -f sealed-secrets.yaml and a secret called test-secret will be created. Now feel free to check-in sealed-secrets.yaml into a public GitHub repository!

🙂