External Secrets Operator — Benchmarks
Scope
Performance characteristics, scaling limits, and resource consumption for External Secrets Operator.
| Provider |
Secret Fetch Time |
Refresh Interval |
Notes |
| AWS Secrets Manager |
50-200ms |
1h default |
API rate limits apply |
| HashiCorp Vault |
10-50ms |
1h default |
Depends on network |
| Azure Key Vault |
50-200ms |
1h default |
Regional latency |
| GCP Secret Manager |
30-100ms |
1h default |
Fast in-region |
Resource Consumption
| ExternalSecrets Count |
Controller CPU |
Controller Memory |
| 50 |
50-100m |
128Mi |
| 200 |
100-300m |
256Mi |
| 1,000 |
500m-1 |
512Mi-1Gi |
Scaling Limits
| Dimension |
Limit |
Notes |
| ExternalSecrets per cluster |
10,000+ |
Controller memory is bottleneck |
| Providers per cluster |
50+ |
Multiple SecretStores |
| Refresh rate |
Provider API limits |
AWS: 10,000/sec, Vault: unlimited |