Open Source Insider

Pocket (machine identity) rocket: Jetstack donates cert-manager to CNCF

Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater

Jetstack wants to be seen as a ‘proper’ open source company i.e. not just a corporate beast with an ‘open technologies’ department that is guilty of open-washing its wares by popping the off bit of software somewhere on a community channel for freemium partial functionality consumption.

No, indeed, Jetstack is doing the proper thing and contributing code.

The latest rocket blast from Jetstack as a Kubernetes product and services provider, today announced that its donation of the cert-manager project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

What does it do?

Well, cert-manager automates the management of X.509 machine identities within Kubernetes and OpenShift.

CTO and co-founder of Jetstack Matthew Bates says that he’s ‘excited’ to see cert-manager join the CNCF Sandbox.

The CNCF Sandbox provides an avenue for technically interesting projects that are beneficial to the cloud-native community that the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) believes warrant experimentation – it is described as a ‘neutral home’ to foster collaborative development.

“It’s been several years in the making to get to 1.0, and we’re hugely thankful to a community of over 250 contributors and many end-users, to get it to where it is today. This is a foundational add-on to many Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters, and the project will benefit from being part of the CNCF and its ecosystem,” said Bates.

In terms of use, cert-manager enables developers to request machine identities to secure applications. 

Certificates can be signed by public and private certificate authorities such as Let’s Encrypt and cert-manager handles the automation of the certificate lifecycle. This means developers can move fast and stay secure, while platform and security teams have control and visibility. 

“The popularity of cert-manager within the Kubernetes community and its utility in a wide range of projects makes cert-manager an ideal project for the CNCF,” notes Bates and team.

Jetstack recently celebrated the v1 release of cert-manage as a milestone in the development of the project. Jetstack was acquired by Venafi, a specialist in machine identity management, in May of 2020. 

In related news, Venafi has launched an Indie Developers Program. As a part of the Machine Identity Management Development Fund, the programme pays individual developers for innovative, open source machine identity projects.

Developers in the program get access to:

  • Open source toolkits in Go, Python, Java and Ruby to accelerate development and testing.
  • Preconfigured cloud instances for immediate, on-demand development.
  • Full support from Venafi engineers.
  • Go-to-market leadership to help educate potential customers and drive demand for new solutions.