Challenge with Creating Secret elasticsearch-es-internal-users with Custom User Values Before ECK Deployment in ArgoCD

Elastic Orchestration Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE)
1

Hi Experts,

Current Situation:

I have a working Elasticsearch setup (xpack: cps-v8.17.3-002) running in a Kubernetes production environment.

In the current deployment process, we are creating the elasticsearch-es-internal-users Secret to ensure that users like elastic-internal, elastic-internal-probe, etc., have their values securely stored in our external secret store.

However, we now want to transition the deployment process to use ArgoCD, and we are facing a challenge with ensuring that the elasticsearch-es-internal-users Secret is created before the Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) operator deploys the Elasticsearch instance.

Question:

How can we manage the creation of the elasticsearch-es-internal-users Secret before the ECK deployment starts, when transitioning to an ArgoCD-driven workflow?

Note:

I tried using secureSettings, but ECK didn't use the elastic-internal and elastic-internal-probe values defined under the es-internal-users secret for the new [il-elasticsearch-test-es-internal-users] secret.

apiVersion: elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/v1
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
  name: il-elasticsearch-test
spec:
  http:
    tls:
      selfSignedCertificate:
        disabled: true
  secureSettings:
    - secretName: es-internal-users
  nodeSets:...

Thanks,
Nivedita