It’s the hottest KubeCon swag on the block: printed, wax-stamped X.509 certificates to take home and show off.

Since we started issuing these little certs in KubeCon Valencia back in May 2022, the cert-manager project pavilion booth has been a smash-hit success - in Chicago last year we issued so many certs that we ran out of wax!

But there’s more to the story than just the swag; these certs are issued on a local Kubernetes cluster running cert-manager, and the story of how we went from a concept to a certificate in your hand is interesting and illustrative for cert-manager as a project, generally!

In this talk we'll discuss:

- How we got to this point: a brief history of cert-manager.
- The technical stuff: how does the KubeCon certificate printer work?
- What's new: exciting changes since last year!
- What we can learn: how the same technology is used to secure critical infrastructure around the world!