How to easily(ish!) get SSL/TLS configured for your web hosting needs using Traefik and cert-manager on Kubernetes
Either if you are publishing a personal blog using WordPress or you want to have a nice .com domain for your portfolio, it’s vital to make sure your readers will have a secure connection to your website.
This used to be a cumbersome process in the old days of web hosting. First, you would have to generate a certificate request (signed by your private key) and send this over with a bunch of other forms to a certification authority like Verisign, and it would take a few days for you to receive a certificate you could use on your website. With that in hand, you would have to figure out how to configure your application server to use it. Then you would have to figure out how to set it up properly, how to keep your private key secure and all the stuff that comes with it.
With all of that set-up, you would finally have a website that you can access with HTTPS via SSL/TLS, just to find out that in a few months you would have forgotten to renew it and out of the sudden your website wouldn’t be trusted anymore. When that happened, you would have to go through the process all over again.
A bit of a pain in the ****, isn’t it?
This is the pain we’re trying to solve with Traefik, Let’s Encrypt and cert-manager. But first, let’s understand what they are and how they will be used.