---
stage: enablement
group: pods
comments: false
description: 'Pods: Secrets'
---

This document is a work-in-progress and represents a very early state of the
Pods design. Significant aspects are not documented, though we expect to add
them in the future. This is one possible architecture for Pods, and we intend to
contrast this with alternatives before deciding which approach to implement.
This documentation will be kept even if we decide not to implement this so that
we can document the reasons for not choosing this approach.

# Pods: Secrets

Where possible, each pod should have its own distinct set of secrets.
However, there will be some secrets that will be required to be the same for all
pods in the cluster

## 1. Definition

GitLab has a lot of
[secrets](https://docs.gitlab.com/charts/installation/secrets.html) that needs
to be configured.

Some secrets are for inter-component communication, e.g. `GitLab Shell secret`,
and used only within a pod.

Some secrets are used for features, e.g. `ci_jwt_signing_key`.

## 2. Data flow

## 3. Proposal

1. Secrets used for features will need to be consistent across all pods, so that the UX is consistent.
    1. This is especially true for the `db_key_base` secret which is used for
       encrypting data at rest in the database - so that projects that are
       transferred to another pod will continue to work. We do not want to have
       to re-encrypt such rows when we move projects/groups between pods.
1. Secrets which are used for intra-pod communication only should be uniquely generated
   per-pod.

## 4. Evaluation

## 4.1. Pros

## 4.2. Cons