In the dynamic landscape of cloud native development, security is paramount. And machine identity management plays a crucial role in ensuring the integrity of applications and data. One open source project that has gained significant traction in this domain is cert-manager, and its adoption is soaring, with over 1.5 million daily downloads. The importance of cert-manager is not just recognized among developers but has extended to industry leaders like Red Hat.
Red Hat's acknowledgment of cert-manager's value is evident in its independent efforts to seamlessly integrate it into OpenShift, the preferred distribution for many Venafi customers adopting cloud native. OpenShift has been a game-changer, empowering organizations to embrace cloud native development securely. What's even more noteworthy is that Venafi continues to play a pivotal role in cert-manager's development and maintenance in collaboration with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
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Cloud Native Certificate Management - Exploring How cert-manager is Used in Kubernetes Production Environments
Venafi's machine identity Issuer, an integral part of the cert-manager open source project, has witnessed substantial adoption among customers. This Issuer facilitates the utilization of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solutions from Venafi, ensuring the robust security of cloud native workloads. Red Hat's strategic integration of cert-manager into OpenShift underscores its commitment to providing a comprehensive platform for secure workload protection, leveraging the strengths of both solutions.
“Strong certificate use within the platform is critical to application security, as highlighted earlier. The only way for PKI to scale for a container orchestration platform is through increasing the use and reach of automation,” notes Anjali Telang,Principal Product Manager of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security and OpenShift. “Red Hat OpenShift plays a pivotal role in this regard by offering integrated automation for all certificates used by control plane and platform components for secure in-cluster communication. Given that enterprise customers sometimes run hundreds or even thousands of applications on a single OpenShift cluster, the automated management of application TLS certificates becomes absolutely indispensable. This is essential to ensure that external users and workloads can securely communicate with the applications on the cluster. The integration of the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShfit, coupled with support from certificate issuers such as Venafi, facilitates the secure management and access of cloud-native applications running on the OpenShift platform.”
The recently launched cert-manager Operator for OpenShift is a testament to the project's significance within the open source community. Red Hat's validation of cert-manager as the de facto standard for cloud native, open source machine identity management reinforces its crucial role in securing Kubernetes environments. The blog post on Red Hat's official platform further emphasizes the significance of cert-manager in OpenShift: The Cert-Manager Operator is Now Generally Available in OpenShift.
While cert-manager is a powerful tool in itself, Red Hat recognizes that achieving comprehensive security in rapidly scaling Kubernetes environments requires more than just a robust identity management solution. Organizations need a platform that provides visibility and policy control to enforce enterprise-wide security—and this need is met with a platform like Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities. Red Hat OpenShift, with its focus on enterprise-grade security, seamlessly integrates with Venafi through a natively supported cert-manager Operator to address this need.
The OpenShift documentation highlights the importance of the cert-manager Operator and Venafi's role in enhancing machine identity security within OpenShift environments. This integration and native support allows enterprises to issue and manage certificates within a robust platform, ensuring that security policies are effectively enforced across the organization.
In conclusion, the alignment of Red Hat OpenShift with the cert-manager open source project marks a significant step towards enhancing cloud native security. Venafi customers using cert-manager with OpenShift can now benefit from a seamlessly integrated solution that leverages PKI solutions for highly secure workload protection. Red Hat's commitment to cert-manager further solidifies its position as the go-to solution for machine identity management in Kubernetes environments. As the industry continues to evolve, this collaboration sets a precedent for how open source projects can be integrated into enterprise solutions to provide a secure foundation for modern application development.
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