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• Secrets are essential in IT environments and need to be managed securely
• Managing secrets is a complex task that requires centralization, lifecycle management, access control, integration, and tooling
• The Kubernetes External Secrets Operator is a solution that automates the process of fetching secrets from external providers and storing them as Kubernetes secrets
• The operator uses custom resources such as Secret Store and External Secret to abstract the details of the provider and the secret
• The operator is a community-driven project that has joined the CNCF as a Sandbox project

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• Historically, identifiers such as IP addresses, passwords, and certificates were used for authentication, but they are no longer effective in a dynamic cloud native system.
• Machine identity and workload identity are crucial for securing cloud native systems.
• Secrets management and access control rely on workload identity or secret zero.
• Cloud credentials can be obtained using OpenID Connect (OIDC) and can be used for authorization.
• SPIFFY and SPIRE provide an identity framework for workload identity and machine identity.
• SPIFFY ID is a URI format that represents the identifier for a workload.
• SPID documents are short-lived and rotated frequently.
• SPID documents are verified using cryptography and trust bundles.
• SPIRE is an implementation of the SPIFFY standards that includes an agent and server.
• The agent attests to the server, and workloads attest to the agent to map selectors to workload identities.