Why should I mount a secret or configmap in Kubernetes

Question

In kubernetes POD I have an option to mount a secret or a configmap as a volume mounted to the POD. It would be difficult to access these files as environment variables. So why should I be doing it instead of using them as environment variables?

Answer 1

This depends on how the application expect to load the secret.

E.g. if the application expect to load an SSL certificate file, it is possible to have the certificated as a file in a Secret and mount the Secret so that the application can read it as file.

Answer 2

You don't have to always mount the secret or configmap. You can use them too set the environment variables as shown below

      envFrom:
      - configMapRef:
          name: env-configmap
      - secretRef:
          name: env-secrets

However, there are situations when you might want to mount them as files. For example:

1. You want to keep your nginx.conf decoupled from your docker image.
2. Put your SSL Certs (cert + private keys) in secret to enable SSL on your web application