What is kms?

This repository holds the blueprint for how Kubernetes securely talks to external encryption services. KMS stands for Key Management Service, and the project defines the communication rules, called proto APIs, that let a Kubernetes cluster hand off secret data to an external system that holds the actual encryption keys, rather than storing those keys alongside the data they protect. In practice, when a Kubernetes cluster needs to encrypt sensitive information like passwords or tokens, it uses these APIs to send the data to a separate key management service. That external service does the encryption and decryption, so the keys never live inside the cluster itself. This separation matters because if someone gains access to your cluster, they still can't decrypt your secrets without also compromising the separate key service. The people who benefit most are teams running Kubernetes in environments with strict security or compliance requirements, think financial services, healthcare, or any organization that needs to demonstrate strong separation between data and encryption keys. A security engineer configuring a cluster, for instance, could use this to plug into an existing corporate key vault so that all cluster secrets are encrypted by a system the application team never directly touches. The README doesn't go into much detail beyond noting it contains the proto API definitions and pointing to a broader design proposal. It's also worth noting this is a staged repository, meaning it's a mirror of code that lives inside the main Kubernetes project. You can't contribute here directly, all changes go through the main Kubernetes repo. The project is maintained by SIG-Auth, the Kubernetes special interest group focused on authentication and authorization.