ConfigMap

Kubernetes - ConfigMap

• ConfigMaps are a Kubernetes resource that allows you to store configuration data in key-value pairs.

• ConfigMaps allow us to decouple our configurations from our container images, which is important because we don’t want to have to rebuild our images every time we want to change a configuration value.

• In a Dockerfile we can set environment variables like this:

ENV MY_ENV_VAR=my-value

ConfigMap are Insecure

• ConfigMaps are a great way to manage innocent environment variables in Kubernetes. Things like:

  • Ports
  • URLs of other services
  • Feature flags
  • Settings that change between environments, like DEBUG mode

• However, they are not cryptographically secure. ConfigMaps aren’t encrypted, and anyone RBAC lets read them in that namespace can see them. (Secrets aren’t much better by default: just base64, unless encryption at rest is enabled.)