Originally reported by dailyhostnews.com. This article is based on Sectigo’s announcement published September 2019.
Sectigo Extends Certificate Manager with Five DevOps Integrations
Sectigo (formerly Comodo CA) has announced five new integrations for its Sectigo Certificate Manager platform, targeting the tools most commonly found in enterprise DevOps pipelines: Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, and HashiCorp Vault. The move is designed to give IT and security teams a unified Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solution that fits naturally into modern infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration workflows.
What Is Sectigo Certificate Manager?
Sectigo Certificate Manager is a cloud-based certificate lifecycle management platform that enables enterprises to issue, renew, revoke, and audit public certificates, private certificates, and IoT device certificates from a single pane of glass. Key capabilities include:
- Centralized management of public, private, and IoT certificates
- Risk reduction through automated certificate renewal and expiry tracking
- Faster threat response via real-time visibility into certificate status
- Compliance and auditability support across the certificate inventory
- Reduced operational overhead through automation hooks
Why These Five Integrations Matter for DevOps
Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, and HashiCorp Vault collectively represent a large share of the tooling used to build, deploy, and configure modern enterprise infrastructure. Each plays a distinct role where certificate management is increasingly critical:
- Docker — Container images and registries require TLS certificates to secure image pulls, inter-service communication, and registry authentication.
- Kubernetes — Cluster components (API server, etcd, kubelets) and service meshes rely heavily on mutual TLS (mTLS); certificate rotation at scale is a common operational pain point.
- Ansible — Playbooks that provision or configure systems can now call Sectigo directly to issue and deploy certificates as part of an automated run, eliminating manual steps.
- Terraform — Infrastructure-as-code workflows can embed certificate provisioning alongside resource creation, ensuring certificates exist before services go live.
- HashiCorp Vault — Vault is widely used as a secrets backend; integrating Sectigo allows Vault-issued certificates to be backed by a trusted public or private CA without operating a standalone PKI.
The PKI Challenge in DevOps Environments
DevOps environments are inherently complex. Microservices, ephemeral containers, and dynamic infrastructure mean that the number of certificates an organization must track can grow rapidly, and short-lived certificates may need to be issued and rotated on timescales measured in hours rather than years. This creates two overlapping problems:
- Scale — Hundreds or thousands of certificates may be active at any moment across clusters and services.
- Expertise — Engineering teams that excel at container orchestration are not always PKI specialists, yet they are expected to deploy and maintain a functioning CA hierarchy.
Lindsay Kent, VP of Product Management at Sectigo, addressed this directly in the announcement:
“All sizeable enterprises either use or are implementing DevOps today. As they do so, these enterprises are also finding that they suddenly need to become PKI experts and must roll out their own PKI to ensure identity for containers and related services.”
Lindsay Kent, VP of Product Management, Sectigo
Visibility, Control, and Flexibility
A key design goal of the integrations is to give operations teams granular control over certificate properties—such as validity period, key algorithm, subject alternative names, and issuing CA—without requiring them to leave their existing toolchain. Kent elaborated:
“These integrations between Sectigo Certificate Manager and the most popular DevOps orchestration tools give operations teams full visibility and control over the certificate properties they choose. An expert partner, like Sectigo, can ensure enterprises follow accepted security practices and can keep implementations current with changes in cryptography needed to stay safe in a changing computing environment.”
Lindsay Kent, VP of Product Management, Sectigo
Importantly, Sectigo Certificate Manager is designed to coexist with existing tooling. Enterprises that already use a different PKI solution or prefer to continue issuing certificates through their current DevOps tool can still connect Sectigo Certificate Manager in a monitoring and reporting capacity, gaining visibility into certificate deployments without replacing their existing workflows.
Practical Takeaways for DevOps and Security Teams
- If your organization runs Kubernetes at scale, evaluate whether certificate rotation for cluster components is automated—manual rotation is a common source of outages.
- Terraform and Ansible users can explore whether certificate issuance can be embedded directly into provisioning pipelines to enforce a “certificate before service” policy.
- Teams already using HashiCorp Vault for secrets management can assess whether integrating a managed CA (rather than a self-signed root) satisfies compliance requirements for certificate trust chains.
- Even if a full migration to Sectigo Certificate Manager is not planned, the monitoring-only mode can be a low-risk first step to gain inventory visibility across certificate sprawl.
As DevOps adoption grows, so does the attack surface associated with unmanaged or expired certificates. Integrations like these reflect a broader industry shift toward treating certificate lifecycle management as a first-class concern in CI/CD and infrastructure pipelines rather than an afterthought.