Recently, we blogged about certificate management on Kubernetes. Today, we’ll be returning to that topic, but we’ll be focusing on the differences an Istio service mesh makes. The primary difference is the method of solving the ACME HTTP-01 challenge. Solving this challenge involves routing an HTTP request from the ACME server (the Certificate Authority) to the cert-manager challenge solver pod. Cert management with Istio Ingress support As we saw in our previous blog post, you can route such a challenge request by using a Kubernetes Ingress gateway.

When exposing services it’s generally a good idea to follow the industry standard and use HTTPS protocol. HTTPS requires a certificate issued by a trusted third party, called a Certificate Authority (or CA for short). There are several ways to acquire one, but a simple and effective method is to use Let’s Encrypt (a CA) by way of the ACME protocol. The ACME protocol is a communication protocol for interacting with CAs that makes it possible to automate the request and issuance of certificates.