Cert-manager Graduates to CNCF Incubating Project

cert-manager, the defacto standard for TLS machine identity management in cloud native service mesh and multi-cloud, multi-cluster environments, achieves key maturity milestone

Venafi^®, the inventor and leader of machine identity management today announced that the open source cert-manager project has graduated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation^® (CNCF) incubation program. The incubation program will help cert-manager widen its community of contributors, expand to new use cases, improve extensibility and advance developer and user experience.

cert-manager was originally created by Jetstack, a Venafi company, and has become the industry standard for TLS machine identity management in Kubernetes and OpenShift environments. Machine identity management is the foundation of security in cloud native environments.

With over 1.5 million downloads per day and 9.4K stars on Git Hub, cert-manager protects cloud native workloads with TLS encryption and provides critical security for clusters.

“cert-manager’s influence on the developer community is clear,” said Chris Aniszcyzk, CTO at CNCF. “Joining the incubator validates its strategic value, which will help to drive cert-manager’s growth. Through the project, we’ll be looking to offer solutions to complex cloud native security problems that don’t stall innovation. We’re excited to see how developers use cert-manager as it evolves.”

cert-manager automates the issuance and renewal of X.509 certificates to authenticate and secure Kubernetes workload communications. communications. This includes securing public-facing workloads with ingress, as well as between microservices, that can span clusters and cloud environments. It was donated by Jetstack to the CNCF Sandbox in November 2020. Since then, the project has benefitted from CNCF’s rigorous maturity program. During the last two years, cert-manager has proven its value and strategic importance to the cloud native landscape through extensive community and end user engagement. Venafi is a leading contributor to the project and works closely alongside a diverse array of contributors from across the ecosystem.

Key stats on the project include:

• Widespread adoption, with 1.5 million downloads per day across industries including financial services, technology, retail, healthcare and manufacturing
• Default installation on 86% of new production clusters
• A 99% approval rating from users across infrastructure of all kinds
• Integration with multiple certificate authorities (CAs), and alignment with multiple open-source projects, including Cilium, Knative, SPIRE, Istio and Linkerd
• Contributions from commercial PKI solutions, such as AWS (PCA) and Google (CAS)

“cert-manager was developed by a small team of passionate engineers, so we’re really proud it’s had such an impact,” says Matt Barker, President of Cloud Native Services for Venafi. “For us, the chance to work alongside projects that we love and respect – such as Kubernetes and Istio – means the incubator feels like the perfect home. CNCF will be vital to cloud native business strategy moving forward, and we’re honored to have a hand in this change.”

As a CNCF-hosted project, cert-manager is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.

About Venafi

Venafi is the cybersecurity market leader in machine identity management. From the ground to the cloud, the Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities manages and protects identities for all types of machines—from software applications, APIs and containers to physical and IoT devices by providing observability, consistency, reliability and freedom of choice across clouds, hybrid environments, data centers and the edge.

An open source pioneer, Jetstack achieved notable industry recognition as the creator of cert-manager, the open source industry standard for cloud native machine identity management. Jetstack’s ope product and solutions protect the application environments and platform infrastructure of global banks, multinational retailing companies and defense organizations by providing enterprise platform and security teams the power to build, scale and secure their cloud infrastructure. The firm was purchased by Venafi in 2020.

With more than 30 patents, Venafi delivers innovative machine identity management solutions for the world's most demanding, security-conscious organizations and government agencies, including the top five U.S. health insurers; the top five U.S. airlines; the top four credit card issuers; three out of the four top accounting and consulting firms; four of the five top U.S. retailers; and the top four banks in each of the following countries: the U.S., the U.K., Australia and South Africa.

For more information visit www.venafi.com and www.jetstack.io.

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 500 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www,cncf,io.

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