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cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift overview - cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift | Security and compliance | OpenShift Container Platform 4.11
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cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift overview

The cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift is a cluster-wide service that provides application certificate lifecycle management. The cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift allows you to integrate with external certificate authorities and provides certificate provisioning, renewal, and retirement.

The cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift is a Technology Preview feature only. Technology Preview features are not supported with Red Hat production service level agreements (SLAs) and might not be functionally complete. Red Hat does not recommend using them in production. These features provide early access to upcoming product features, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process.

For more information about the support scope of Red Hat Technology Preview features, see Technology Preview Features Support Scope.

About the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift

The cert-manager project introduces certificate authorities and certificates as resource types in the Kubernetes API, which makes it possible to provide certificates on demand to developers working within your cluster. The cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift provides a supported way to integrate cert-manager into your OpenShift Container Platform cluster.

The cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift provides the following features:

  • Support for integrating with external certificate authorities

  • Tools to manage certificates

  • Ability for developers to self-serve certificates

  • Automatic certificate renewal

Do not attempt to use more than one cert-manager Operator in your cluster. If you have a community cert-manager Operator installed in your cluster, you must uninstall it before installing the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift.

Certificate request methods

There are two ways to request a certificate using the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift:

Using the cert-manager.io/CertificateRequest object

With this method a service developer creates a CertificateRequest object with a valid issuerRef pointing to a configured issuer (configured by a service infrastructure administrator). A service infrastructure administrator then accepts or denies the certificate request. Only accepted certificate requests create a corresponding certificate.

Using the cert-manager.io/Certificate object

With this method, a service developer creates a Certificate object with a valid issuerRef and obtains a certificate from a secret that they pointed to the Certificate object.

Additional resources