ACM Finally Automates Certificate Management for Kubernetes

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now supports automated certificate management for Kubernetes workloads through AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK).

Previously, using ACM certificates in Kubernetes required manual steps: exporting certificates via API, creating Kubernetes Secrets, and manually updating them at renewal. With ACK, you can define certificates as Kubernetes resources, and the controller automates the complete lifecycle - requesting, exporting, creating Secrets, and auto-updating at renewal.

This works for both public certificates (ACM exportable certificates) and private certificates (AWS Private CA), enabling automated certificate management for:

• TLS termination in application pods
• Service mesh communication (Istio, Linkerd)
• Third-party ingress controllers (NGINX Ingress, Traefik)
• Hybrid and edge Kubernetes environments

Available in all commercial AWS regions, AWS GovCloud (US), and AWS China regions where ACM is available.

For details and implementation, see the official announcement.