K8s Bootcamp Day 4— Environment Variables: ConfigMaps and Secrets

K8s Bootcamp: Forge Your Superpower with Hands-on Exercises from Novice to Advanced Deployments

Hello there!

Welcome to the 4th article of the K8s Bootcamp series. If you are new here, get a quick start to this article series with my first article on K8s Essentials: Pods, Deployments, and Your Superpower.

This K8s Bootcamp will discuss novice to advanced K8s concepts and hands-on exercises. Also, this article series will benefit you in achieving your CKAD certification.

Today we will discuss environment variables and the importance of keeping your configurations and sensitive data via different ways such as ConfigMaps and Secrets. Also, we will discuss how we store data in secrets and encrypt secret data at rest.

Environment Variables

Importance of having environment variables in K8s

In the context of K8s and generally in software development, environment variables are key-value pairs used to store and access configuration data at runtime. Through these, we can dynamically change an application’s behavior without requiring code changes.