TLS¶

How to Set Up Preview Environments for Pull Requests

Have you ever been frustrated at long merge queues? Did you ever wish there was a better and faster way to get feedback on your code changes and approval from your team members?

You may have also been on the other side of the table, reviewing pull requests and wishing there was a better way to actually test the revisions before approving it; giving you a sense of what it would feel and look like if it were to merge.

Netlify and other frontend hosting services have spoiled us with the ability to spin up a live instance of the application for each pull request for static files. But what about backend applications? How can we achieve the same and deploy our backend for every new proposed change in pull requests?

In this blog post, we will explore how to set up preview environments for each pull request using GitHub Actions and Kubernetes. This guide includes spinning up the application as a live instance with an internet accessible URL to preview and verify the changes before they find their way into the main trunk.

cert-manager: All-in-One Kubernetes TLS Certificate Manager

Kubernetes is a great orchestration tool for managing your applications and all its dependencies. However, it comes with an extensible architecture and with an unopinionated approach to many of the day-to-day operational tasks.

One of these tasks is the management of TLS certificates. This includes issuing as well as renewing certificates from a trusted Certificate Authority. This CA may be a public internet-facing application or an internal service that needs encrypted communication between parties.

In this post, we will introduce the industry de-facto tool of choice for managing certificates in Kubernetes: cert-manager. We will walk you through the installation of the operator, configuring the issuer(s), and receiving a TLS certificate as a Kubernetes Secret for the Ingress or Gateway of your application.

Finally, we will create the Gateway CRD and expose an application securely over HTTPS to the internet.

If that gets you excited, hop on and let's get started!