A systems administrator is deploying a new application in a Kubernetes cluster. The application requires a database password, which the administrator decides to store in a Kubernetes object. To follow best practices for managing sensitive information, the administrator uses a Secret. Which statement accurately describes the default behavior of how this Secret's data is stored within the cluster?
A Secret is intended for non-confidential data; a ConfigMap should be used for storing passwords and other sensitive information.
The Secret is stored exclusively within the filesystem of the Pod that consumes it and is isolated from the cluster's control plane.
The Secret's data is stored in the cluster's etcd datastore as a base64-encoded string, which is not a form of encryption.
The Secret's data is automatically encrypted using AES-256 by the API server before being persisted to etcd.
The correct answer is that a Kubernetes Secret's data is stored in the cluster's etcd datastore as a base64-encoded string. Base64 is an encoding scheme, not an encryption scheme, meaning the data is obscured but not cryptographically secured. While Kubernetes supports encryption at rest for Secrets, it is not enabled by default and requires explicit configuration by an administrator. A ConfigMap is used for non-sensitive configuration data, not for passwords. Secrets are cluster-level API objects stored in etcd and are made available to Pods, not stored exclusively within them.
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What is etcd, and why does Kubernetes use it to store Secrets?
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What is the difference between encoding and encryption, and why does Kubernetes use base64 for Secrets by default?
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