Csi

Secrets Store CSI Driver (formally secrets-store.csi.k8s.io) is a Kubernetes SIG Auth project that uses the Container Storage Interface to mount secrets, certificates, and keys from external secret backends directly into pod filesystems as ephemeral tmpfs volumes, bypassing the Kubernetes Secret object and etcd entirely. The driver runs as a DaemonSet on every node; when a pod referencing a CSI volume of type secrets-store.csi.k8s.io is scheduled, the driver communicates with a provider plugin over gRPC to retrieve the secret content from the configured backend, writes it to a per-pod tmpfs mount, and makes it available inside the container at the specified path. When the pod terminates, the tmpfs is unmounted and the data is gone — secrets have no persistence beyond the lifetime of the pod that requested them.