https://7362441a.jons-devlog.pages.dev/tags/dns-01/Recent content in Dns-01 on Jon's DevlogHugoen-usTue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://7362441a.jons-devlog.pages.dev/fleet-platform/phase-02-part-01-cert-manager-rate-limits-restore-race/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://7362441a.jons-devlog.pages.dev/fleet-platform/phase-02-part-01-cert-manager-rate-limits-restore-race/<h2 id="cert-manager">cert-manager</h2> <p>Setting up cert-manager was pretty easy with a Helm chart. I did spend a lot of time on this step but it was mostly googling and figuring out what to do about bootstrap secrets which I detail below. The most interesting thing I learned was part of the values file, specifically <code>installCRDs</code> (or <code>crds.enabled</code>, depending on chart version). CRDs, Custom Resource Definitions, are objects that teach the Kubernetes API server about new kinds of resources, like <code>Certificate</code> and <code>ClusterIssuer</code>. They&rsquo;re not backed by Go directly, they&rsquo;re schema definitions, and a controller (cert-manager&rsquo;s own pod, running Go code) is what actually watches for objects of that kind and acts on them. So a CRD without its controller running is just an inert schema. The controller is the operator, the CRD is the vocabulary it teaches the cluster.</p>