DevOps / ArgoCD interview questions

How does ArgoCD integrate with external secret management tools like Vault or Sealed Secrets?

ArgoCD deliberately does not manage secrets natively — it stores no sensitive values and recommends keeping plaintext secrets out of Git. Two widely adopted patterns bridge ArgoCD with secret management:

1. Sealed Secrets (Bitnami)

Sealed Secrets encrypts a Kubernetes Secret into a SealedSecret CRD safe to commit to Git. The sealed-secrets-controller decrypts it back into a standard Secret using a cluster-side private key. From ArgoCD's perspective, a SealedSecret is just another manifest to sync.

kubeseal --fetch-cert > pub-cert.pem
kubectl create secret generic db-pass --from-literal=password=s3cr3t \
  --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubeseal --cert pub-cert.pem -o yaml > sealed-db-pass.yaml
# Commit sealed-db-pass.yaml to Git; ArgoCD syncs it; controller decrypts

2. External Secrets Operator (ESO)

ESO introduces ExternalSecret and SecretStore CRDs. You commit these CRDs (which contain no secret values — only references like Vault paths or AWS Secrets Manager ARNs) to Git. ArgoCD syncs them; ESO fetches actual values from the external provider and creates a native Kubernetes Secret.

Sealed Secrets vs. External Secrets Operator
Dimension	Sealed Secrets	ESO
Secret storage	Encrypted ciphertext in Git	External vault; only references in Git
Rotation support	Manual re-seal required	Automatic via refreshInterval
Multi-provider	No (cluster key only)	Yes (Vault, AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.)

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What does the External Secrets Operator store in Git when integrated with ArgoCD?The plaintext secret values encrypted with ArgoCD's internal key

✗ Try again — ESO stores no secret values in Git at all.

ExternalSecret CRDs containing only references to secret paths in the provider

✓ Well done! Only provider path references are committed; actual values remain in the external store.

A Vault token that the cluster uses to fetch secrets at runtime

✗ Try again — committing tokens to Git is a security anti-pattern; ESO uses SecretStore auth config separately.

Which ESO feature automatically refreshes secret values from the provider without redeploying?ArgoCD selfHeal on the ExternalSecret resource

✗ Try again — selfHeal corrects drift in the CRD definition, not the secret value content.

The refreshInterval field in the ExternalSecret spec

✓ Well done! ESO polls the provider on the configured interval and updates the Kubernetes Secret automatically.

A CronJob that re-syncs the ArgoCD Application on a schedule

✗ Try again — refreshInterval is built into ESO; no external CronJob is required.

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DevOps / ArgoCD interview questions

How does ArgoCD integrate with external secret management tools like Vault or Sealed Secrets?

1. Sealed Secrets (Bitnami)

2. External Secrets Operator (ESO)

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