The New Stack Makers

Jetstack’s cert-manager, a leading open-source project in Kubernetes certificate management, began as a job interview challenge. Co-founder Matt Barker recalls asking a prospective engineer to automate Let’s Encrypt within Kubernetes. By Monday, the candidate had created kube-lego, which evolved into cert-manager, now downloaded over 500 million times monthly.Cert-manager’s journey to CNCF graduation, achieved in September, began with its donation to the foundation four years ago. Relaunched as cert-manager, the project grew under engineer James Munnelly, becoming the de facto standard for certificate lifecycle management. The thriving community and ecosystem around cert-manager highlighted its suitability for CNCF stewardship. However, maintainers, including Ashley Davis, noted challenges in navigating differing opinions within its vast user base.With graduation achieved, cert-manager’s roadmap includes sub-projects like trust-manager, addressing TLS trust bundle management and Istio integration. Barker aims