Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces cert-manager Graduation

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America – November 12, 2024 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the graduation of cert-manager.

cert-manager helps cloud native developers automate Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) certificate issuance and renewal. It ensures secure communication within distributed systems by automating and simplifying the issuance, renewal, and lifecycle management of X.509 certificates in Kubernetes platforms. This eliminates the manual process of generating and managing certificates and helps ensure systems remain secure without constant manual intervention.

“By making it easier for developers to obtain, manage, and automate security certificates, cert-manager helps ensure applications remain secure throughout their lifecycles, making the ecosystem more secure as a whole,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “We’re thrilled to see the project reach this milestone and look forward to it continuing to improve the cloud native security space.”

cert-manager was created in 2017 at Jetstack, which is now a part of Venafi, a CyberArk company. It was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in November 2020, and, over the past four years, has continued to grow, bringing in new maintainers, expanding its user base, and adding key features in response to community needs. It has built a network of more than 450 contributors and issued more than 200 releases. It moved to the Incubating maturity level in 2022 and today plays a vital role in the CNCF ecosystem by integrating with other projects like Kubernetes, SPIFFE, Istio, Prometheus, and Envoy to strengthen cloud native infrastructure security across diverse environments. 

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