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Vault📜

Overview📜

Vault provides secret management and protects sensitive data. Hashicorp Vault secure, stores and tightly controls access to tokens, passwords, certificates, encryption keys for protecting secrets and other sensitive data using a UI, CLI, or HTTP API. Docker container static analysis and policy-based compliance system that automates the inspection, analysis, and evaluation of images against user-defined checks to allow high confidence in container deployments by ensuring workload content meets the required criteria.

Vault📜

graph LR
  subgraph "Vault"
    vaultservice1("vault")
  end

  subgraph "Secrets Management"
    vaultservice1("vault") --> secret1("Secret")
    secret1("Secret") --> vaultservice1("vault")
  end

  subgraph "Authentication"
    vaultservice1("vault") --> authenticationservice1("Keycloak")
    authenticationservice1("Keycloak") --> vaultservice1("vault")
  end

  subgraph "Logging"
    vaultservice1("vault") --> fluent(Fluentbit) --> logging-ek-es-http
    logging-ek-es-http{{Elastic Service<br />logging-ek-es-http}} --> elastic[(Elastic Storage)]
  end

  subgraph "Monitoring"
    svcmonitor("Service Monitor") --> vaultservice1("vault")
    Prometheus --> svcmonitor("Service Monitor")
  end

For more information on the Hashicorp Vault architecture, see Hashicorp Vault.

Big Bang Touch Points📜

Licensing📜

The Big Bang Vault deployment uses a Mozilla Public License. The license is an open source copyleft license. The MPL’s “file-level” copyleft is designed to encourage contributors to share modifications they make to your code, while still allowing them to combine your code with code under other licenses (open or proprietary) with minimal restrictions.

Additionally, to enable add a license to enable enterprise Vault features and support the following is an example of how to modify the values within Big Bang:

addons:
  vault:
    values:
      enterpriseLicense:
        # The name of the Kubernetes secret that holds the enterprise license. The
        # secret must be in the same namespace that Vault is installed into.
        secretName: ""
        # The key within the Kubernetes secret that holds the enterprise license.
        secretKey: "license"

Storage📜

Vault supports several storage options for the durable storage of Vault’s information. As of Vault 1.4, an Integrated Storage option is offered. This storage backend does not rely on any third party systems; it implements high availability, supports Enterprise Replication features, and provides backup/restore workflows.

The following is an example of how to size the storage within the Big Bang values:

addons:
  vault:
    values:
      dataStorage:
        enabled: true
        # Size of the PVC created
        size: 10Gi
        # Location where the PVC will be mounted.
        mountPath: "/vault/data"
        # Name of the storage class to use.  If null it will use the
        # configured default Storage Class.
        storageClass: null
        # Access Mode of the storage device being used for the PVC
        accessMode: ReadWriteOnce
        # Annotations to apply to the PVC
        annotations: {}

      # This configures the Vault Statefulset to create a PVC for audit
      # logs.  Once Vault is deployed, initialized and unsealed, Vault must
      # be configured to use this for audit logs.  This will be mounted to
      # /vault/audit
      # See https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/audit/index.html to know more
      auditStorage:
        enabled: true
        # Size of the PVC created
        size: 10Gi
        # Location where the PVC will be mounted.
        mountPath: "/vault/audit"
        # Name of the storage class to use.  If null it will use the
        # configured default Storage Class.
        storageClass: null
        # Access Mode of the storage device being used for the PVC
        accessMode: ReadWriteOnce
        # Annotations to apply to the PVC
        annotations: {}

High Availability📜

Vault supports a multi-server mode for high availability. This mode protects against outages by running multiple Vault servers. High availability mode is automatically enabled when using a data store that supports it. Vault supports one or more servers to scale out the deployment.

To scale the deployment in Big Bang, the following is recommended:

addons:
  vault:
    values:
      server:
        ha:
          enabled: true
          replicas: 3

For additional information for Vault configuration for High Availability within Big Bang reference the following, Vault HA

UI📜

Vault features a web interface for interacting with Vault. Through the UI you are able to create, read, update, and delete secrets, authenticate, unseal, and more. The Vault UI is enabled by default at the package level.

Logging📜

Vault produces detailed logs that contain information about user interactions, internal processes, warnings and errors. The verbosity of the logs is controlled using the /sys/loggers endpoint. The log levels are DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, and TRACE. It is always recommended to increase the log level to DEBUG in order to ensure the availability of the maximum amount of information.

The following is an example to enable debug level logging for the vault deployment in Big Bang:

addons:
  vault:
    values:
      # Enables debug logging.
      debug: true

Note: within Big Bang, logs are captured by fluentbit and shipped to elastic by default.

For more information, see Vault Loggers.

Monitoring📜

The /sys/metrics endpoint is used to get telemetry metrics for Vault. This endpoint returns the telemetry metrics for Vault. It can be used by metrics collections systems like Prometheus that use a pull model for metrics collection. The Big Bang Vault Helm chart has been modified to use your monitoring: values in Big Bang to automatically toggle metrics on/off.

Within Big Bang there is additional setup required to configure Vault and monitoring. For more information see, Vault with Prometheus

Health Checks📜

Liveness and readiness probes are included in the Vault Helm chart for all deployments. The /sys/health endpoint is used to check the health status of Vault. This endpoint returns the health status of Vault. This matches the semantics of a Consul HTTP health check and provides a simple way to monitor the health of a Vault instance.

For more information, see Vault System Health.