The Three Deliveries: File, Env, Secret

One engine, three ways a document reaches a workload — because real software disagrees about how it wants to be configured. Grafana re-reads files; Airflow reads environment variables at boot and nothing else; a Strimzi-shaped operator watches Kubernetes Secrets. Picking the delivery is a one-line decision here; what follows is the map.

The decision procedure, in order: can the consumer read a file? File delivery — it is the only fully live one and the only one that never touches etcd. Does something else own the consumer (an operator that only reads Secrets)? The Secret target. Env-only software? env-inject, with the start-freeze stated rather than papered over.

Against the Vault Agent Injector

The closest relative of the webhook+agent half — same architecture (mutating webhook, injected init/sidecar, shared memory volume, pod service-account auth, file permissions and run-as knobs), different center of gravity:

The injector's template idiom, translated

The Vault injector spells "render me a connection string" as a per-secret annotation pair; here the same result is one source and one template, because the whole pod has one resolved document:

# Vault Agent Injector:
#   vault.hashicorp.com/agent-inject-secret-db-creds: "secret/data/db-app"
#   vault.hashicorp.com/agent-inject-template-db-creds: |
#     {{- with secret "secret/data/db-app" -}}
#     postgres://{{ .Data.data.username }}:{{ .Data.data.password }}@postgres:5432/appdb
#     {{- end }}

# dynamic-config-k8s, the same string from the same KV secret:
dynamic-config.rs/source: "vault"
dynamic-config.rs/endpoint: "https://vault.vault.svc:8200"
dynamic-config.rs/key: "secret/db-app"
dynamic-config.rs/auth: "kubernetes"
dynamic-config.rs/auth-role: "db-app"
dynamic-config.rs/path: "/config/db.env"
dynamic-config.rs/template: |
  DATABASE_URL=postgres://{{ username }}:{{ password }}@postgres:5432/appdb

The template owns the bytes (minijinja, strict-undefined: a typo is an error, not an empty string), so any shape works — a URL, an .env, a whole config file. What does NOT translate is the database/creds/… path in the injector's example: that is Vault's dynamic secrets engine, credentials minted per-request with leases — the boundary the next paragraph prices. This agent reads KV; for minted-with-TTL credentials, run the Vault Agent beside it.

One more idiom, matched: the injector's several -secret-<name> pairs per pod are this webhook's named renders — source.db, key.db, path.db beside the default, one agent and one file per name, all in one shared directory. When the pod wants them MERGED into a single document instead, the config server composes sections and the pod reads one endpoint. What has no counterpart is agent-inject-command (a post-render hook): env-restart covers the restart case, and anything richer belongs to the app.

Honest edge the other way: for dynamic Vault secrets with leases (database credentials minted per-pod, TTL renewal mid-life), the Vault Agent is the purpose-built tool and this is not — this agent re-fetches documents; it does not manage leases.

Against External Secrets Operator

The closest relative of the operator half — same split between a namespaced store and a platform-owned cluster store, different product:

Honest edge the other way: as a secret-synchronisation fleet tool across dozens of managers (AWS/GCP/Azure SM, Doppler, 1Password…), ESO has breadth this project does not chase — the store list here grows by demand, not by roadmap.

Use cases, mapped

• Airflow / env-only software → env-inject over a rendered dotenv (example); add env-restart: "true" and a changed document restarts just that container in seconds — otherwise changes wait for the next pod start, and that limit is stated instead of hidden.
• Grafana / anything that re-reads files → the sidecar; live updates, zero etcd, tmpfs only (example).
• Strimzi-shaped operators / JVM client.properties → the Secret target, file or envEntries shape (example).
• Multi-tenant platforms → ClusterDynamicConfigClass with a namespaces allowlist; tenants never see a credential (example).
• A chart's existingSecret / an operator's secretName: → the Secret target with shape: entries — leaf keys verbatim, so the names some other chart already chose are met exactly (example).
• All of it at once → the four-component shop stack: three secrets injected three ways (a chart's existingSecret, a secretKeyRef env, a mounted-and-live file), the API on env-inject + env-restart, the worker on live files — credentials existing only in the platform namespace.
• Vault dynamic database credentials with TTLs → the Vault Agent Injector, genuinely. Use both: it owns the lease, this owns the configuration.