SSL Hell

Https is ubiquitous because encryption in transit is required for compliance ( GDPR, PCI-DSS… )
Modern solutions are built with the micro service patterns that offers a solution to the monolithic application challenges, like scalability, agility, availability, etc. However, micro-services come with their own set of challenges and issues.

Micro-services add significant overhead for operations as they have to manage many applications.
One of the challenges is managing certificate life cycle for these micro services.
Manual certificate life cycle management adds a significant time overhead, and is prone to human errors.There is a need to have an automated seamless process for certificate life cycle management, including certificate issuing and renewal, this where cert manager can come to the rescue.

ACME (Automatic Certificate Management Environment) protocol allows for secure dynamic certificate issuance and renewal

ACME provides a mechanism for automated certificate issuance and renewal however it requires an integration with the micro services.
Cert Manager is a native Kubernetes certificate management controller.
It helps with integrating various certificate providers as well as many different dns providers
It will ensure certificates are valid and up to date, and attempt to renew certificates at a configured time before expiry.

In this talk we will talk about cert-manager, how to use it to issue, deploy, and manage certificates using cert-manager, while going through some demos.