How to use the Secrets Store CSI Driver provider Amazon EKS add-on with Secrets Manager

The post introduces the Amazon EKS add-on for the AWS Secrets Store CSI Driver provider and provides a step-by-step tutorial to securely retrieve secrets from AWS Secrets Manager (and parameters from Parameter Store) and mount them as files in Kubernetes pods. It covers prerequisites, creating an EKS cluster, setting up IAM and EKS Pod Identity, installing the add-on, defining a SecretProviderClass, deploying an example workload, verifying secret access, and cleaning up, while emphasizing security best practices such as least-privilege permissions, resource policies, and FIPS endpoint support.