Anel Husakovic added a comment - 2022-06-17 09:13 Testing the client .GET() method: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/controller-runtime/blob/master/pkg/client/example_test.go in case where secret exists in a cluster $ kubectl get secrets NAME TYPE DATA AGE default-token-hqpn5 kubernetes.io/service-account-token 3 14d mariadb-sample-secret Opaque 1 40m Testing returned error and the object root_secret := &corev1.Secret{} err := r.Get(ctx, req.Namespace, root_secret) log.Info("Get()", "error: ", err, "root_secret", *root_secret)   2022-06-17T01:59:20.696-0700 INFO controllers.MariaDB1 Get() {"MariaDB: ": "default/mariadb-sample", "error: ": "Secret \"mariadb-sample\" not found", "root_secret": {"metadata":{"creationTimestamp":null}}} We can see that the object is not nil and there is creationTime Null (what we can use to check), also err is not nil Update the code with typed object (have to stop controller and run make run again to have visible changes) err := r.Get(ctx, client.ObjectKey{ Namespace: req.Namespace, Name: req.Name + "-secret", }, root_secret) log.Info("Get()", "error: ", err, "root_secret", *root_secret)   2022-06-17T01:59:56.279-0700 INFO controllers.MariaDB1 Get() {"MariaDB: ": "default/mariadb-sample", "error: ": null, "root_secret": {"kind":"Secret","apiVersion":"v1","metadata":{"name":"mariadb-sample-secret","namespace":"default","uid":"8fda9ce2-d7e2-425d-81e3-33e6a779175a","resourceVersion":"82748","creationTimestamp":"2022-06-17T08:25:44Z","managedFields":[{"manager":"main","operation":"Update","apiVersion":"v1","time":"2022-06-17T08:25:44Z","fieldsType":"FieldsV1","fieldsV1":{"f:data":{".":{},"f:mariadb-root-password":{}},"f:type":{}}}]},"data":{"mariadb-root-password":"bXlzZWNyZXQ="},"type":"Opaque"}} Note here that err is nil and we got the object After making changes use make install build run