Every application has configuration data like API key, DB URL, DB user, DB password, etc. Yes, you can hardcode these data in your application but after some time it will be unmanageable. You need some kind of dynamic solution where you define all these data once and every component of your cluster can access these data.
Suppose our application DB URL changes for that we need to change every place where the URL is used. So, for this our application needs to be rebuilt again and we have to change the code inside the application. To encounter this situation we use ConfigMaps and Secrets for storing the application’s required data.
ConfigMaps – A ConfigMaps is an API object used to store non-confidential data in key-value pairs. Pods can consume ConfigMaps as environment variables, command-line arguments, or as configuration files in a volume.
Ex – ConfigMaps contains the URL of the database, user, and other non-credential data.
Secrets – A secret is similar to ConfigMaps, except a secret is used for sensitive information such as credentials. One of the main differences is that you have to explicitly tell kubectl to show you the contents of a secret.
- It is encoded in base64.
Aniruddha Basak 