ARC Community Feedback: Secret storage requirements

[Steve-Glass]

👋 I'm @Steve-Glass a Product Manager with GitHub Actions and starting to taking a deeper look into ARC. Developers have been reaching out and asking for ARC integrations with secret store cloud providers such as Azure Key Vault, Hashicorp Vault, and AWS Key Management Service. The requirement of the integration is to pull the Personal Access Token (PAT) or GitHub App private key from the key management service as opposed to etcd.

I would appreciate any feedback the community has on this topic as we start scoping out the next set of features for ARC. Does your organization require integration between ARC and cloud-based secret stores? If yes, which provider are you looking to integrate with?

TIA!

[houserx-jmcc]

Does your organization require integration between ARC and cloud-based secret stores? If yes, which provider are you looking to integrate with?

Yup! It would be great to be able to hook directly into AWS Secrets Manager or AWS Systems Manager for pulling a PAT/key. That is the standard place we store secrets for literally everything else, and would make ARC easier to manage overall.

[Steve-Glass]

Thank you for the feedback!

[eremeevfd]

We would be happy to have integration with HashiCorp Vault. But could you explain to me a little bit, this integration with cloud-based secret provider, is it for fetching secrets in workflows and their jobs themselves? Or is it just for runner configuration?

[Steve-Glass]

👋 The purpose of this is solely to retrieve the secrets required for configuring ARC. It will not have any impact on how secrets are managed or utilized during a workflow run.

[blackliner]

I think the canonical approach is to use the External Secrets Operator, which decouples the secret storage from this application

[julian-waibel]

Currently I do it like already stated by @blackliner: Install and configure External Secrets Operator in the cluster using Argo CD. The operator then "syncs" the external secrets (e.g. from Azure Key Vault or HashiCorp Vault) into the cluster creating a local Kubernetes native secret. This secret (name) can then be referenced in the GitHub ARC scale set Helm chart using the githubConfigSecret Helm value as can be seen in the following. Therefore @Steve-Glass I don't see an added value to implement this feature into the GitHub ARC project. The operator already does a very good job.

actions-runner-controller/charts/gha-runner-scale-set/values.yaml

Lines 15 to 17 in 8947327

	github_token: ""
	## If you have a pre-define Kubernetes secret in the same namespace the gha-runner-scale-set is going to deploy,
	## you can also reference it via `githubConfigSecret: pre-defined-secret`.