What are Kubernetes Secrets, and how do they differ from other Kubernetes objects?

One of the fundamental building blocks of Kubernetes is Kubernetes objects. Through Kubernetes objects, we can represent the state of the system. An application running on Kubernetes consists of the actual program, the resources the application uses, and the configurations of the application such as health checks. With regard to other cross-cutting concerns such as security, there are configurations for role-based access control (RBAC); these include cluster-wide roles, namespace roles, and the role bindings to a user or entity. Furthermore, Kubernetes objects include namespaces, which act as logical containers, and network policies, which are cluster-wide traffic rules. By creating Kubernetes objects, we declare the desired state of the cluster. Kubernetes is responsible for and will work toward ensuring that the actual state of the system matches the state defined by the objects we create.

A typical...