[Editor’s note: This post was written by Haoxiang Zhou who was a work placement student at Jetstack for the past four months. We are grateful to Haoxiang for adding this very useful feature, and all his other contributions, and wish him all the best with his final year of study.]

This post will explore the newest addition to the kubectl plugin of cert-manager, kubectl cert-manager status certificate, a command designed to make the troubleshooting experience of cert-manager problems easier. The command was hugely improved in the recent v1 release. Jump to the bottom for more information on how to get involved and start contributing!

We recently worked on a customer project, where they wanted to secure the connection between their Java Spring Boot application and their MySQL Database, all this running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). We suggested they use cert-manager, our preferred certificate management tool on Kubernetes.

We’re excited to announce v0.6 of cert-manager, the general purpose X.509 certificate management tool for Kubernetes. Cert-manager provides automated issuance, renewal and management of certificates within your organisation.

Certificate management in highly dynamic environments is no easy feat, and if approached without careful consideration could quickly lead to outages and service interuption when certificates begin expiring. By standardising on a single tool for managing your PKI assets, you can ensure that certificates are being automatically renewed, and that the appropriate teams are notified if there are any issues or policy violations within your cluster.

Those of you who closely follow Jetstack’s open source projects may have already noticed that our new certificate management tool, cert-manager, has been available for some time now. In fact, we now have over 1,000 stars on GitHub!

Cert-manager is a general purpose x509 certificate management tool for Kubernetes. In today’s modern web, securing application traffic is critical. cert-manager aims to simplify management, issuance and renewal of certificates within your organisation.