One of the most challenging questions in cloud environments is about how secure is my application when its deployed in the public cloud ?
Its no secret that security aspects are much more important in a public cloud than it was in classic environments.
But dont be surprised that many applications even in public cloud dont follow best practice security patterns.
This has several reasons for example time and costs are very high trying to achieve a high security level.
But in fact AWS and Kubernetes offer many options which let you improve your security level without too much effort.
I like to share some of the possibilities that you have when creating a secure AWS EKS cluster.

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Typical Java backend applications need to integrate with existing 3rd party services. In most cases, calls to these 3rd party services are authenticated. Frequently, Java applications are required to use login credentials for authenticated calls: A username and a password.

This scenario raises a problem: How can we store the password needed for calling the 3rd party service? We could store it in a properties file, but then everyone with access to the properties file learns the password. We could provide the password as a command line parameter or environment variable, but then everyone with access to the startup script learns the password. We could hard-code it in our application, but then everyone with access to the JAR file learns the password. We could encrypt the password using a master key, but then we have the same problem again: How to store the master key?

The common solution is to use a secure data store provided by the operating system. Our application runs on Windows Server, so we use the Windows Data Protection API (DPAPI) for protecting our secret passwords. This blog post shows how to use the DPAPI in Java applications.

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