A production engineer is configuring a new application, which is running in containers, that requires access to a database. Which of the following methods will allow the application to authenticate to the database in the MOST secure way?

A. Store the credentials in a variable on every worker node
B. Store the credentials on a shared volume using whole-disk encryption
C. Store the credentials in a configuration file using SHA-256 inside the container image
D. Store the credentials using the orchestrator secret manager