ACE configuration object type Generic for CP4I needs to support base64 encoding for handling simple Openshift secrets instead of zip format

We are running the latest ACE SC-2 release on CP4I v16.1.0 on Openshift 4.14 on Azure Cloud.

We have a few integrations that connect to SFTP using an ssh-identity file/ssh key file. We have placed the private part of the ssh key file in Azure Key Vault Secret that is synced to Openshift secret using akv2k8s utility. The public part of ssh key is shared with the department who owns the SFTP server.

Today in order to get the Openshift secret (which contains the ssh private key) mounted on to ACE IntegrationServer pod, we use ACE configuration object type "generic" which requires that the contents of the secret be zipped. Just to get it zipped we had to use the Openshift pipelines which is an overkill, the main issue is the life-cycle management of it, where if the key is updated in Azure Key Vault, it gets synced to Openshift every 2 seconds, but then someone needs to be run the Openshift pipeline manually to refresh the secret referenced by the ACE configuraton object of type "Generic".

Therefore, we would expect that for simple ASCII secrets (Openshift secrets of type opaque), that you support a simple base64 encoding (like you do for object types serverconf and odbcini), rather than having to zip the secret contents. You could alternatively create a new ACE configuration type to handle the problem better. This also has a huge benefit that we could alternatively store the private ssh key in Github secrets instead of Azure Key Vault and then use the jsonnet base64 encoding function in a yaml file to sync the Github secret using ArgoCD which makes the overall solution simple!