[jfindley]

Thanks! I'm not sure if you're involved in the Phippy project at all, but the way it's worded sounds to me a lot like the author believes that encoding == encryption, and I'd maybe consider just dropping that line entirely.

I suspect that it doesn't really matter to users at all what form of encoding you use to store data.

[nicolast]

I'm not involved in the Phippy 'project' in any way (only got a copy of the books and some plastic version of the animals as a speaker here at KubeCon :-D).

I agree the wording may be a bit 'off' and providing a detail which doesn't necessarily add value or can cause confusion, so that would've been good feedback before the whole thing went to 'print' :)

As for the end user who shouldn't know about encoding: that's not entirely true. Thing is, when sending a Secret object into the API (as YAML or JSON), you need to pre-encode the secret value using base64 in this document (so it's not K8s doing this for you, indeed another source of confusion given the current wording). The reason being that the API being YAML/JSON-based could otherwise not be used to store non-UTF8 secret values (e.g. binary ones).

However, if you use 'kubectl create secret' instead of interacting with the API directly (or using 'kubectl create -f ...' with a YAML document as input, which is also 'interacting with the API directly' with some extras) then I believe the CLI will take care of this encoding for you, where required.

See https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/secret/

[yebyen]

I think if you consider the audience of this book might actually be 7 years old, it's fair to leave the line in.

Something something, "today's lucky 10,000" https://xkcd.com/1053/

The reason for the base64 encoding as I understand it, is so that it is clear whether and how the entry needs to be quoted and escaped in your yaml file. A base64 entry contains only alphanumeric(ish) characters. Writing Helm charts is about the hardest mandatory part of managing Kubernetes clusters, and understanding how your secrets are meant to enter the cluster is definitely part of that confusion.

It's an important detail, especially if you know what that means. You are right to ask about the hippo-headed giraffe, "wait, isn't there supposed to be something else here?"

There is! The seven or eight year old reader is not expected to get this on the first read-through though ;)