Company
Date Published
Author
Riccardo Marinelli
Word count
810
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Elastic Cloud has adopted Automated Certificate Management using Let's Encrypt to enhance security and streamline operations as it expands its services and regions. This transition to a fully automated regional ACM (ACME Certificate Manager) was driven by the cumbersome and time-consuming nature of the previous manual certificate management process. After evaluating several options, Elastic chose a solution based on Terraform, leveraging an internal terraform provider alongside a terraform ACME certificate provider, which is familiar to the Elastic SRE team. The implementation involved overcoming challenges such as Let's Encrypt certificate rate limits and DNS challenges, requiring collaboration across multiple teams to ensure secure and reliable certificate sharing across regions. The ACM solution automates daily certificate renewal and revocation, using Terraform to manage certificates and store them in HashiCorp Vault while monitoring is conducted through Elastic Uptime Monitoring and Kibana. This automation has improved service stability by reducing human intervention and allowing for more rapid updates and expansions.