Cert-Manager
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.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles Cert-Manager the way a machine reads it — 14 machine-readable artifacts across 6 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Cert-Manager scores 46.9/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 7/100 (human only). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Cert-Manager
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Cert-Manager. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 6
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
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...
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Rate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Cert Manager Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Cert Manager Finops
FINOPSSemantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Cert Manager Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 1
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
Cert-Manager API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 2
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
cert-manager Certificate
JSON SCHEMAcert-manager Issuer and ClusterIssuer
JSON SCHEMASecurity Posture 1
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Cert-Manager — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 1
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 4
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Design & Contract 1
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 2
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 1
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 2
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Company 1
The organization behind the API
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/cert-manager · machine-readable index on apis.io