Understanding how to update secrets

To update the values in a secret, you must re-create the pods that use that secret. Because running pods do not automatically detect changes to secret data, restarting the pods ensures they consume the updated configuration.

Updating a secret follows the same workflow as deploying a new container image. You can use the kubectl rolling-update command.

The resourceVersion value in a secret is not specified when it is referenced. Therefore, if a secret is updated at the same time as pods are starting, the version of the secret that is used for the pod is not defined.

Note

Currently, it is not possible to check the resource version of a secret object that was used when a pod was created. It is planned that pods will report this information, so that a controller could restart ones using an old resourceVersion. In the interim, do not update the data of existing secrets, but create new ones with distinct names.