# Cert-Manager

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/cert-manager/  
**Website:** https://cert-manager.io  
**APIs profiled:** 6

cert-manager is a powerful and extensible X.509 certificate controller for Kubernetes and OpenShift workloads. It obtains certificates from a variety of issuers, including Let's Encrypt, HashiCorp Vault, and Venafi, and ensures certificates are valid and up-to-date, attempting to renew them before expiry. It supports certificate issuance for Ingress, Gateway API, and arbitrary workloads via Certificate resources.

## Kin Score — 28.9 / 100 (thin)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 28.9).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 72.2 |
| Contract Quality | 25.4 |
| Governance | 9.8 |
| Contract Governance | 9.8 |
| Operational Transparency | 36.8 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 31.0 |
| Commercial Clarity | 15.8 |
| Access Clarity | 15.8 |

## Agent readiness — 3.0 (human-only)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | no |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Freemium — onboarding: unknown, pricing: freemium, trial: no (confidence: medium).

## APIs (6)

- **cert-manager Kubernetes API** — The cert-manager API extends the Kubernetes API with custom resources including Certificate, Issuer, ClusterIssuer, CertificateRequest, and Order. These resources allow declarat...
- **cert-manager CLI (cmctl)** — cmctl is the command-line tool for managing cert-manager resources. It provides commands for checking certificate status, manually triggering renewals, approving or denying cert...
- **trust-manager** — trust-manager is a cert-manager companion project for managing TLS trust bundles in Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters. It distributes CA bundles via a Bundle custom resource to ...
- **cert-manager approver-policy** — approver-policy is a cert-manager policy plugin that automatically approves or denies CertificateRequest resources based on defined CertificateRequestPolicy custom resources. It...
- **cert-manager csi-driver** — csi-driver is a Kubernetes Container Storage Interface plugin that works alongside cert-manager to seamlessly request and mount certificate key pairs as ephemeral volumes direct...
- **cert-manager csi-driver-spiffe** — csi-driver-spiffe is a Kubernetes CSI plugin that works alongside cert-manager to transparently deliver SPIFFE SVIDs as X.509 certificate key pairs to mounted pods using ephemer...

## Security (1)

- **Cert Manager Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS

## Plans (1)

- **Cert Manager Plans Pricing**

## Tags

Certificates, Cloud-Native, Graduated, Kubernetes, Security, TLS

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/cert-manager/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.