Free SSL certificate for your Kubernetes cluster with Rancher

Thanks to Let’s encrypt we can create SSL certificates for our HTTPS or TLS services for.. FREE!

These certificates have a 99% of compatibility with browsers.

Let’s Encrypt for your cluster in 5 minutes!

Prerequisites

A running Kubernetes cluster.

For our example, we use a cluster managed with Rancher.

If you don’t have one, you can follow this post to setup yours in just 15 minutes!

How to create a Kubernetes cluster with Rancher on Hetzner

Let’s go, Let’s Encrypt

Let’s Encrypt is a certification authority (CA) created in 2016 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mozilla Foundation. Its target is that every Internet communication be ciphered using TLS protocol.

Until that date, if you wanted a valid SSL/TLS certificate for your Internet service, you had to pay at least around $10 for a cheap SSL certificate such as Comodo or RapidSSL.

That purchased certificate has one year validation.