Troubleshooting Secrets in Kubernetes Deployments

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Troubleshooting Secrets in Kubernetes Deployments

You are a container engineer at Cube4Lyf, an e-gaming platform geared towards puzzle and logic games. As their Kubernetes implementation matures, the security team is looking to leverage cluster Secrets to manage sensitive information. For one of their early prototypes, a team has attempted to access credentials for a third-party service as environment Secrets within their containers. However, the engineers report that the container is currently unable to resolve the sensitive values as expected, preventing it from accessing the external service. You will need to examine the configuration of the Secret and the Deployment creating the Pod to fix this issue.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 25, 2025

Duration

45m

Challenge

Fix the Configuration Issues in vendor-secret.yaml
Identify and correct the issues in vendor-secret.yaml so that the Secret data maps to an environment variable.

Storing Secrets as an encoded map:
```
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: vendor-secret
data:
  endpoint: YXBpLmUtc2FsZS5jb20vdjIK   
  token: Z3Vlc3NtZWlmeW91Y2FuCg==
```

Challenge

Fix the Configuration Issues in application-deployment.yaml

Identify and correct the issues in application-deployment.yaml so that the Secret data maps to an environment variable.

Accessing Secrets as environment variables:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: puzzle-plaza
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: puzzle-plaza
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
        labels:
            app: puzzle-plaza
    spec:
        containers:
        - name: shop-app
          image: busybox
          command: ['sh', '-c', 'while true; echo "STATUS: UP"; do sleep 3600; done']
          env:
          - name: ENDPOINT
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                name: vendor-secret
                key: endpoint
          - name: TOKEN
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                name: vendor-secret
                key: token

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