I am new at Kubernetes and am trying to understand the most efficient and secure way to handle sensitive persisted data that interacts with a k8 pod. I have the following requirements when I start a pod in a k8s cluster:

• The pod should have persisted storage.
• Data inside the pod should be persistent even if the pod crashes or restarts.
• I should be able to easily add or remove data from hostPath into the pod. (Not sure if this is feasible since I do not know how the data will behave if the pod starts on a new node in a multi node environment. Do all nodes have access to the data on the same hostPath?)

Currently, I have been using StatefulSets with a persistent volume claim on GKE. The image that I am using has a couple of constraints as follows:

• I have to mount a configuration file into the pod before it starts. (I am currently using configmaps to pass the configuration file)
• The pod that comes up, creates its own TLS certificates which I need to pass to other pods. (Currently I do not have a process in place to do this and thus have been manually copy pasting these certificates into other pods)

So, how do I maintain a common persisted storage that handles sensitive data between multiple pods and how do I add pre-configured data to this storage? Any guidance or suggestions are appreciated.