In this series, we’ll set up a base environment for the steps ahead using technologies that are fully cloud-provider agnostic — master them once, and you can apply them anywhere.
We’ll kick things off by installing cert-manager, which leverages Let’s Encrypt to automatically generate free SSL certificates. After installation, we’ll provision a real certificate to confirm everything is working.
From there, we’ll install ExternalDNS and validate it by registering a live service.
Finally, we’ll bring it all together with Ingress-NGINX — wiring up the cert-manager certificate and using ExternalDNS to register the ingress in Google Cloud DNS.
Before diving in, define the following variables that will be referenced throughout the tutorial:
DOMAIN_NAME=mydomain.com
CLUSTER_NAME=mycluster
PROJECT_ID="MY_PROJECT"
LOCATION="us-central-1"Ready? Start with Part I — cert-manager.