Kubernetes Cluster Configuration Concepts
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Internal
Secrets
A secret is a mechanism, backed by a Kubernetes API resource, that allows applications running on a Kubernetes cluster to safely manage, store and access security-sensitive information such as passwords, OAuth tokens and ssh keys. This mechanism provides a better alternative to placing that information in a container image or in the pod metadata. An individual secret contains a small amount of data, limited to 1 MiB - this is to discourage creation of very large secrets that would exhaust API server and kubelet memory.
A pod must explicitly reference a secret in its manifest to access it. If that does not happen, the system will not initialize the infrastructure that exposes the information to the pod.