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Reading it from the cluster

External Secrets Operator runs in the controllers layer (flux/20_controllers/external-secrets/). It has no deploy-time dependency on OpenBao — it only talks to it when an ExternalSecret reconciles, and retries until it answers. Each consuming namespace ships its own ServiceAccount + SecretStore + ExternalSecret alongside the app in flux/50_apps/<app>/. A SecretStore is namespaced, and that is the point: a ClusterSecretStore would authenticate as one identity for everyone and dissolve the per-namespace boundary this root builds.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: seaweedfs
  namespace: observability
---
apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1
kind: SecretStore
metadata:
  name: seaweedfs
  namespace: observability
spec:
  provider:
    vault:
      server: http://openbao-active.openbao.svc:8200
      path: seaweedfs
      version: v2
      auth:
        kubernetes:
          mountPath: kubernetes
          role: seaweedfs-observability
          serviceAccountRef:
            name: seaweedfs
---
apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1
kind: ExternalSecret
metadata:
  name: loki-s3
  namespace: observability
spec:
  refreshInterval: 1h
  secretStoreRef:
    name: seaweedfs
    kind: SecretStore
  target:
    name: loki-s3
  data:
    - secretKey: S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID
      remoteRef:
        key: observability/loki
        property: access_key_id
    - secretKey: S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
      remoteRef:
        key: observability/loki
        property: secret_access_key

The vault provider path is the kv-v2 mount this root owns, and the role is the per-namespace Kubernetes auth role from Which mount. The KV keys (observability/loki, observability/mimir, observability/tempo) and their properties (access_key_id, secret_access_key) did not change at the cutover; only the store, the ServiceAccount and the role were renamed.

Only the two key fields are pulled. bucket, endpoint and region also sit in the KV entry, but they are not secrets and the charts carry them in values; dataFrom.extract would copy all five into the Secret if an app wanted that.

Buckets are addressed path-style — endpoint carries no bucket, and clients must set force_path_style (boto3: addressing_style = "path") with region us-east-1.

The endpoint stored in KV is https://s3.gewis.nl, the URL every client uses, inside the cluster or not. Admin access and tofu use http://s3.net.gewis.nl:8333 instead — see S3.