Vault Operator Notes

• Namespace level resource that can reach other namespaces if RBAC is so configured.

• Vault Operator CRD will not create if it’s rbac is not configured. Pods won’t even start. Operator pod shows no errors. Very confusing.

• Vault instance (by default) consists of a stateful set, a PVC (and PV of course) and a secret holding the unseal keys. All 3 must be deleted to nuke and pave the vault instance.

Secrets

Operator creates the following secrets:

• vault-operator-token-

• vault-token-

Both are K8s service account tokens. They appear to be independent of vault instances, though are used to connect to vault instances.

Auth Test

Run the following. (assumes port forwarding is set up)

VAULT_ADDR=http://localhost:8200 vault write auth/kubernetes/login role=default jwt=$(k get secret $(k get secret | grep vault-token | awk '{print $1}')  -o json | jq -r .data.token | base64 -D)

Nuke and Pave

k delete vault <name>

k delete pvc vault-file

k delete secret vault-unseal-keys

Cert Manager

Cert Manager has to be installed separately of course. Then you need an issuer for it to use vault.

Example issuer:

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Issuer
metadata:
  name: vault
  namespace: default
spec:
  vault:
    path: pki/sign/default
    server: http://vault.default.svc.cluster.local:8200
    caBundle: (output of `curl http://localhost:8200/v1/pki/ca/pem | base64`)
    auth:
      kubernetes:
        role: default
        mountPath: /v1/auth/kubernetes
        secretRef:
          name: (output of `k get secret | grep vault-token | awk '{print $1}'`)
          key: token

The problem, of course, is that this resource cannot be created until the vault instance is up and running. It would be amazing if we could get this included into the vault-operator.

In the meantime, I’ll probably do some sort of a Job that no-ops until it gets something back from those two calls, and then creates the resource.

You can, however, pre create the certificate before the issuer exists. It will sit in an unready state until you create the issuer. This means we can probably cheaply script the resource creation.