How to access Azure Key Vault (AKV) from Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using Managed Identities

Question

We have some dotnet Core App Services running on Azure and using Azure key Vault with Managed Identities.

Planning to deploy these dotnet core services to azure kubernetes but I haven't found any relevant document/support to use AKV with Kubernetes Services. Any Guidance or references

Answer 1

There are a couple of options to access KV from AKS:

• Use Azure Key Vault with FlexVol ( deprecated . continue to use this for kubernetes version 1.15)

  With Key Vault, you store and regularly rotate secrets such as credentials, storage account keys, or certificates. You can integrate Azure Key Vault with an AKS cluster using a FlexVolume. The FlexVolume driver lets the AKS cluster natively retrieve credentials from Key Vault and securely provide them only to the requesting pod. Work with your cluster operator to deploy the Key Vault FlexVol driver onto the AKS nodes. You can use a pod managed identity to request access to Key Vault and retrieve the credentials you need through the FlexVolume driver.

  Azure Key Vault with FlexVol is intended for use with applications and services running on Linux pods and nodes.

• Use Azure Key Vault Provider for Secrets Store CSI Driver (For kubernetes 1.16+)

  Azure Key Vault provider for Secrets Store CSI driver allows you to get secret contents stored in an Azure Key Vault instance and use the Secrets Store CSI driver interface to mount them into Kubernetes pods.

• Use pod managed identities

  A managed identity for Azure resources lets a pod authenticate itself against any service in Azure that supports it such as Storage, SQL. The pod is assigned an Azure Identity that lets them authenticate to Azure Active Directory and receive a digital token. This digital token can be presented to other Azure services that check if the pod is authorized to access the service and perform the required actions. This approach means that no secrets are required for database connection strings, for example.

I found the pod identity approach easier as you don't need to change your code.