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!