Automating certificate provisioning

The cert-manager tool (https://cert-manager.io/docs/) is a certificate management controller for Kubernetes.

It can facilitate the automated creation, provisioning, and rotation of certificates. It supports several sources for the certificates; for example:

• An RFC8555 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8555)-compliant ACME server such as Let’s Encrypt (https://letsencrypt.org)
• HashiCorp Vault PKI Secrets Engine (https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/pki)
• Self-signed certificates, issued by cert-manager itself

For a full list of available issuers, see https://cert-manager.io/docs/configuration/.

Since self-signed certificates don’t require communication with any external resources, they are a good candidate for use during development. We will use them within the scope of this book.

Using cert-manager in production typically requires the use of an issuer, such as Let’s Encrypt...