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Version: 12.x (Current)

Cert-Manager

cert-manager is a tool useful to manage certificates in your Kubernetes cluster. It is available in the PaaS and it adds TLS Certificates and Issuers as Kubernetes resources. With cert-manager you can:

  • Generate new certificates
  • Renew Certificates
  • Use the Certificates in your application

Resources​

The resources made available by cert-manager are the Certificate and Issuer/ClusterIssuer.

Certificates​

The Certificate resource represent a single TLS certificate, that is provided by the specified Issuer.

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
  name: example-com
  namespace: sandbox
spec:
  secretName: example-com-tls
  issuerRef:
    name: ca-issuer
    kind: Issuer
    # At least one of a DNS Name, URI, or IP address is required.
    dnsNames:
        - example.com
        - www.example.com

Issuer​

Issuers (and ClusterIssuers) is the cert-manager way to define a Signing Authority in Kubernetes.

A simple example of Issuer is the CA type, you can found below an example taken from the official documentation [1]

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Issuer
metadata:
  name: ca-issuer
  namespace: mesh-system
spec:
  ca:
    secretName: ca-key-pair

In this example, the Issuer uses a key-pair to generate encrypted certificates.

For more detailed configuration options you can go to the cert-manager documentation [2].

Use cert-manager on the PaaS​

The first step to use a custom DNS, is to register it creating a CNAME record that points to your project's endpoint. You can find the project endpoint in the "Project Overview" area, under Runtime Environments.

After registering the DNS, there are two methods to start generating your certificate:

  • Define your Issuer and Certificates
  • Use Mia-platform ClusterIssuer to generate your certificate

Defining Issuer and Certificates​

If you want to create an authority that can sign your certificates, you need an Issuer (ClusterIssuers are not supported on the PaaS). After creating the Issuer, you can reference it in the Certificate specifications.

Issuers can be of various types (CA, self-signed, Vault..) depending on which signing authority you want to leverage to generate the Certificates. Below we explore an example of certificate of the ACME[3] type, with an HTTP01 solver.

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Issuer
metadata:
  name: example-issuer
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: mia-platform
spec:
  acme:
    server: https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
    privateKeySecretRef:
      name: example-issuer-account-key
    solvers:
    - http01:
        ingress:
          class: nginx

Once creating an Issuer, you can start generating Certificates referencing it.

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: mia-platform
  name: example-name
  namespace: example-ns
spec:
  commonName: '*.example.io'
  dnsNames:
  - '*.example.io'
  issuerRef:
    kind: Issuer
    name: example-issuer
  secretName: example-cert

Leveraging the cluster certificate​

Thanks to the preconfigured ClusterIssuer on the Mia Platform PaaS, you can generate production-ready certificates without having to think about your Issuer.

The ClusterIssuer present in the PaaS leverages LetsEncrypt to generate certificates through a challenge http01.

You can issue a Certificate referencing the ClusterIssuer present in the PaaS. Below an example.

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: mia-platform
  name: example-name
  namespace: example-ns
spec:
  commonName: example.com
  dnsNames:
  - example.com
  - example2.com
  issuerRef:
    kind: ClusterIssuer
    name: cert-manager-issuer
  secretName: example-cert

Deploying resources​

When deploying cert-manager resources, you can decide if you want to have them in a specific environment or in every one of them. This is accomplished creating the resources in the right project folders.

Deploy in every Environment​

'deploying in every Environment' means that the resources that you have created to manage Cert-manager will be deployed singularly in every Environment/Namespace of your project. To achieve this result, you need to identify if your project template uses default Kubernetes resource or Kustomize structure, and then save the resources in the correct path.

  • Base project: The resources need to be saved in the path configuration/<resource.yaml>
  • Kustomize project: The resources need to be saved in the path configuration/<resource.yaml>

Deploy in a specific Environment​

Depending which template you are using:

  • Base project: The resources need to be saved in the path configuration/<environmentId>/<resource.yaml>
  • Kustomize project: The resources need to be saved in the path overlays/<environmentId>/<resource.yaml>

Where environmentId is a variable identified with the parameter envId configured on the console.