Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Practice 2026 - Free Cloud Engineer Practice Questions and Study Guide

Secrets are Google's recommended best practice for working with sensitive information inside of Kubernetes. Secret objects can store and manage sensitive data, such as passwords, tokens, and keys, and provide access to those resources through volumes or environment variables to Kubernetes Pods. This option is preferred over ConfigMaps, volumes, or environment variables because Secrets are natively designed for storing sensitive information and offer enhanced security features such as encryption and access control. ConfigMaps are typically used for storing non-sensitive configuration data, volumes do not have encryption capabilities, and environment variables are not secure and can be exposed. Therefore, storing database credentials in a Secret would be the best practice for your engineers to safely access and use sensitive information within a Kubernetes Pod.