> Ultimately, secrets need to live somewhere and need to be accessed as plain text. Just make sure that the access as small window is as [sic] possible, and try to obliterate it after use, if possible.
This is not an all-or-nothing situation; it's a game of mitigation. If the process needs to retain the secret in memory, true, there's not much you can do about that. But I don't think that minimizing where else you're storing it is just security through obscurity. Fewer possible attack vectors is still fewer possible attack vectors.
The last time I was responsible for the scaffolding of a new software service it supported reading secrets from a file. It confused the operations team and I was just told to include support for an environment variable. Oh well, I tried.
> Once the application hits “readiness” status (as determined by health endpoints or the load balancer), the secrets volume should be unmounted and made inaccessible.