Certification track: Professional Cloud Security Engineer (PSE)

Vaultwarden on GKE Autopilot — Lab Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Vaultwarden is a lightweight, self-hosted Bitwarden-compatible password manager written in Rust. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Vaultwarden on GKE Autopilot module on Google Cloud: deploy it, access and verify it, run it day-to-day, observe it, diagnose common problems, and tear it down.

The lab focuses on operating the GKE module and the Google Cloud platform, not on Vaultwarden product features or Bitwarden client setup. For the complete list of provisioned services and every configuration input (organised by group), see the Configuration Guide — this lab deliberately does not duplicate that detail so it stays accurate over time.

Objectives

By the end of this lab you will be able to:

Deploy the module from the RAD platform and locate the resources it provisions.
Connect to the GKE cluster and access the running workload.
Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage secrets and storage.
Observe the workload with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring.
Diagnose and resolve the most common deployment and runtime issues.
Tear the deployment down cleanly.

Prerequisites

Services_GCP deployed in the target project (provides the VPC, GKE Autopilot cluster, Cloud SQL, Artifact Registry, and shared service accounts this module depends on).
A Google Cloud project with billing enabled.
gcloud CLI and kubectl installed; gcloud auth login and gcloud auth application-default login completed.
Project Owner (or equivalent) IAM on the project.
RAD platform access with permission to deploy modules into the project.

Set these shell variables once; every task below reuses them:

export PROJECT="<your-gcp-project-id>"
export REGION="us-central1"           # the region you deploy into

Task 1 — Deploy the module [Automated]

Click Deploy in the RAD platform top navigation, open Vaultwarden (GKE) from the Platform Modules list to start configuration, set project_id, and review the inputs. Configure only what you need — the Configuration Guide documents every input by group, with defaults. Review the estimated cost (if credits are enabled) and click Deploy, which opens the deployment status page with real-time logs.

Note: signups_allowed defaults to false. Set it to true only if you need to register the first account immediately after deploy, then apply an Update providing false to close registrations.
The platform deploys a StatefulSet with a 10 Gi PersistentVolumeClaim into the GKE Autopilot cluster, provisions a Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL) database with its Secret Manager secrets, a Cloud Storage attachments bucket, builds the container image, and runs a one-shot database-initialisation job. First deploys take roughly 20–35 minutes (Cloud SQL creation dominates).

Connect to the cluster and discover the namespace with name-agnostic filters:

CLUSTER=$(gcloud container clusters list --project="$PROJECT" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
gcloud container clusters get-credentials "$CLUSTER" --region="$REGION" --project="$PROJECT"

NS=$(kubectl get ns -o name | grep vaultwarden | head -1 | cut -d/ -f2)
echo "Cluster: $CLUSTER   Namespace: $NS"
kubectl get all -n "$NS"

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]

Confirm the workload is running and find its external address:

kubectl get pods,svc,pvc -n "$NS"
EXTERNAL_IP=$(kubectl get svc -n "$NS" \
  -o jsonpath='{.items[?(@.spec.type=="LoadBalancer")].status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
echo "External IP: $EXTERNAL_IP"
curl -s "http://${EXTERNAL_IP}/alive"   # expect: OK

The Vaultwarden web vault is accessible at http://${EXTERNAL_IP} in a browser. There is no auto-generated admin credential stored in Secret Manager — the /admin panel is disabled by default and is only activated when ADMIN_TOKEN is supplied in environment_variables at deploy time.

Retrieve the database password from Secret Manager (for reference or DBA access):

DB_SECRET=$(gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" \
  --filter="name~vaultwarden" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret="$DB_SECRET" --project="$PROJECT"

Task 3 — Operate & keep it running (Day-2) [Manual]

Inspect the workload — StatefulSet, pods, horizontal autoscaler, and persistent volumes:

kubectl get deploy,statefulset,pods,hpa,pvc -n "$NS"
kubectl describe statefulset -n "$NS"

Scale by changing the min/max instance inputs and clicking Update on the deployment details page — the module owns the workload spec, so scaling is a configuration change, not a manual kubectl scale (a manual edit would be reverted on the next apply).
Update the application version by changing the version input via Update on the deployment details page; a new image builds and a rolling update replaces the pods while the PVC retains all vault data.

Manage secrets, storage, and jobs:

kubectl get secrets -n "$NS"
gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~vaultwarden"
kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"          # DB-init job

Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

INSTANCE=$(gcloud sql instances list --project="$PROJECT" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
gcloud sql connect "$INSTANCE" --user=vaultwarden --project="$PROJECT"

Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]

Logs — from kubectl or the Logs Explorer:
```
kubectl logs -n "$NS" statefulset/"$(kubectl get statefulset -n "$NS" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')" --tail=50
```
Logs Explorer filter: resource.type="k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name="<namespace>".
Monitoring — open the GKE / Kubernetes dashboards and review pod CPU and memory utilisation, restart counts, and PVC usage. The module can provision an uptime check targeting /alive; review Monitoring → Uptime checks and Alerting → Policies when enabled.

Task 5 — Troubleshoot & debug [Manual]

Durable techniques for the failure modes you are most likely to hit. These are platform-level diagnostics and do not change with Vaultwarden releases.

Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs; the startup and liveness probes both target /alive:

kubectl describe pod -n "$NS" <pod>          # Events section shows probe/mount errors
kubectl logs -n "$NS" <pod> --previous       # logs from the crashed container

Database connection errors: confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE, the DB password secret materialised into the namespace, and the init job completed. Also confirm enable_cloudsql_volume = true — Vaultwarden requires the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar via Unix socket.

Initialisation job failed: inspect the job and its pod logs:

kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"
kubectl logs -n "$NS" job/<job-name>

PVC not bound / pod stuck Pending: check kubectl describe pvc -n "$NS" events for StorageClass or capacity issues.
Pending pod / no external IP: check kubectl describe pod events for resource or quota issues, and confirm the LoadBalancer Service has an assigned IP.
Image pull errors: confirm the image exists in Artifact Registry and the node service account can pull it.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (notably signups_allowed, container_port, enable_cloudsql_volume, and quota_memory_requests binary-unit requirement).

Task 6 — Tear down [Automated]

On the Deployments page, open the deployment and click the Trash icon (Delete). Delete runs terraform destroy and is irreversible (the deployment record is retained for history). If a deployment is stuck and the RAD platform can no longer manage it (for example after manual changes that conflict with the Terraform state), use Purge instead — it removes the deployment from RAD's records without destroying the cloud resources (it makes RAD forget the project). This removes everything the module created — the Kubernetes workload and namespace, PersistentVolumeClaim, Cloud SQL database, Secret Manager secrets, Cloud Storage buckets, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, GKE cluster, shared Cloud SQL, registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary

Task	Type	Outcome
1 — Deploy	Automated	Module deploys the GKE StatefulSet, PVC, Cloud SQL, GCS bucket, secrets, and runs DB init
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Connect to the cluster; health check passes at `/alive`; web vault is reachable
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect workload, scale, update version, manage secrets/storage, DB access
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose pod, database, init-job, PVC, scheduling, and image-pull issues
6 — Tear down	Automated	Delete (Trash) removes all module resources

By Dr Shiyghan Emmanuel Navti · Google Cloud certified: ACE · PCA · PCD · PDE · PSE · CDL

Overview​

Objectives​

Prerequisites​

Task 1 — Deploy the module [Automated]​

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]​

Task 3 — Operate & keep it running (Day-2) [Manual]​

Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]​

Task 5 — Troubleshoot & debug [Manual]​

Task 6 — Tear down [Automated]​

Summary​