Using Kubernetes ConfigMaps securely

Kubernetes ConfigMaps store non-sensitive configuration data as key-value pairs, allowing applications to remain portable across development, testing, and production environments by separating configuration from code. They can provide data to Pods through mounted volumes, environment variables, or command-line arguments, support plain and base64-encoded binary data, and have a 1 MB size limit. Because ConfigMaps store information in plain text, they are unsuitable for credentials, passwords, API keys, tokens, and other confidential values. Kubernetes Secrets offer a related mechanism for sensitive data, with several types such as Opaque and basic-auth, but require additional protections because they are not necessarily encrypted at rest by default and base64 encoding alone is not encryption. The recommended approach is to use ConfigMaps for publicly accessible settings such as hostnames, ports, and database names, use Secrets for credentials and other private values, avoid exposing Secrets through environment variables, and enforce encryption at rest and RBAC policies to restrict access and modification.

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