Automated issuance
Certificates requested, validated and installed by automation using ACME, cloud certificate managers or cert-manager, with no manual CSR handling anywhere in the flow.
Networking & Data
DNS, TLS & Certificate Automation
Certificates that renew themselves and DNS living in version control beside your stack.
The work
What this actually does
An expired certificate is one of the few outages that is entirely self-inflicted and entirely avoidable. We automate issuance and renewal through ACME clients, cloud certificate services or a mesh's built-in controller, with the renewal path tested rather than assumed. Monitoring checks not just expiry dates but chain validity, hostname coverage and the ciphers a client will actually negotiate.
The DNS half is about making records reviewable. Zones move into Terraform or a provider's infrastructure-as-code tooling, changes go through a pull request, and a low TTL is used where a cutover is planned. We also document delegation, split-horizon views and the internal names that break when a VPC is rebuilt.
If any of these sound familiar
- A certificate expires on a Sunday and the site goes down
- DNS records were edited in a console and nobody knows why
- Wildcard certificates mask the one hostname that actually broke
- Migration to a new provider means rebuilding zones from memory
Scope
What's included
Every engagement on this page covers the following, sized to your setup rather than delivered as a fixed package. If something here is not relevant to you, it comes off the scope and off the price.
Renewal and rotation
Renewals scheduled well before expiry with alerting on failure, and rotation rehearsed so a renewal that breaks does so in a test rather than in production.
DNS as code
Zones and records managed in Terraform or a provider pipeline, reviewed like any other change, with environment-specific values kept in variables rather than typed by hand.
Expiry monitoring
Checks from outside your network that watch expiry, chain completeness and hostname match for every public endpoint, with alerts routed to someone who can act.
Cutover planning
Low TTLs staged ahead of a migration, records duplicated and verified before delegation moves, and a rollback path that does not depend on waiting out a long cache.
TLS hardening
Modern protocol versions and cipher suites, HSTS where it is appropriate, and internal certificates issued from a private authority so service traffic is encrypted too.
What changes
What teams typically see
0Manual certificate renewals
30 daysRenewal lead time
2 minTypical propagation check
Handover
What you keep
Everything produced during the engagement is yours: the repositories, the accounts, the documentation. There is no proprietary layer and nothing to unlicense if you take the work in-house.
- Certificate inventory with owners and expiry dates
- Automated certificate issuance and renewal configuration
- DNS zones and records defined in version control
- External expiry and chain monitoring checks
- Provider migration cutover and rollback plan
Tooling
Tools we use here
A starting point, not a requirement. We work in whatever you already run wherever it does the job.
Cloudflare
AWS
Kubernetes
Terraform
nginx
HashiCorp Vault
Microsoft Azure
How it runs
From first call to handover
The same four steps on every engagement. You see each one before it starts and can stop at any of them.
- 01
Inventory what exists
Every certificate, zone and record we can find, with its owner, expiry and where it is managed, including the ones nobody remembers creating.
- 02
Choose the automation route
ACM, Let's Encrypt, cert-manager or a commercial authority, selected on where your endpoints live and how much control you need over validation.
- 03
Move zones into code
Records are imported, differences resolved and the zone applied from a pipeline, after which console edits are disabled or at least loudly detected.
- 04
Verify and hand over
We test renewal end to end, confirm monitoring fires when it should, and leave a runbook covering issuance, rotation and emergency replacement.
Questions
Asked before we start
Can you automate certificates for internal services too?
Yes. An internal certificate authority or a mesh's built-in issuance covers service-to-service traffic, and short-lived certificates are practical when renewal is automatic. The harder part is usually trust distribution to clients outside your control.
Is Let's Encrypt suitable for a commercial product?
For most public web endpoints, yes. Rate limits and the sixty-day lifetime are manageable with automation. Some enterprises prefer a commercial authority for warranty, support or longer lifetimes, and we will say when that is worth the cost.
What happens if a renewal fails silently?
That is the failure mode worth engineering against. Monitoring checks the certificate from outside the network, alerts on approaching expiry and on validation errors, and routes to a named team. A renewal that fails twice should never reach the third attempt unremarked.
Will moving DNS into code slow down emergency changes?
It changes the process rather than removing it. Emergency changes still go through the same pipeline, usually in minutes. The gain is that the change is recorded, reviewable and reversible, which matters far more during an incident than the few extra seconds.
Networking & Data
Often needed alongside this
Networking & Data
Networking, Ingress & Service Mesh
Traffic that reaches the right service, stays encrypted in transit, and fails over without dropping connections.
- Load balancers, ingress and API gateways
- Istio and Cilium service mesh, mTLS by default
- Traffic shifting for canary and blue/green rollout
Platform & Containers
Kubernetes & Containers
Production-grade clusters with sane defaults, safe rollouts and an operator experience your team will actually enjoy.
- EKS, AKS, GKE and self-managed clusters
- Helm, Kustomize and GitOps-driven deployments
- Node autoscaling, resource tuning and cost control
Infrastructure & Cloud
Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Strategy
A deliberate, costed answer to multi-cloud — or a clear recommendation that you don't need it.
- Workload placement and portability assessments
- Cross-cloud networking and identity
- On-prem to cloud connectivity and hybrid patterns
Worth a conversation about DNS, TLS & Certificate Automation?
Bring the specific problem. We will tell you honestly whether this is the service that fixes it, and what it would take.