Getting Started with Smallstep Certificate Manager

Smallstep Certificate Manager is a commercial product built on step-ca that delivers a highly available hosted certificate authorities, expiry notifications and alerts, a management dashboard, Active Revocation, API, and other features. With Smallstep Certificate Manager, you can easily issue private TLS/SSL certificates to all your things. Learn more here.

If you need to manage devices or workloads that are not supported yet, then you can use Certificate Manager to tinker a solution.

The Certificate Manager exposes the fundamental building blocks for the supported use cases within the Smallstep platform.

For context, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers Elastic Beanstalk, streamlining application deployment on AWS. It manages infrastructure provisioning, including servers (EC2 instances), databases, load balancers, networks, and auto-scaling groups. You upload your app's code, and Elastic Beanstalk handles the rest. While it creates these resources, you maintain complete control and visibility over each resource, enabling developers to customize them as required. In contrast, if you were to manually navigate through AWS, you'd find yourself having to reason about these individual components, a potentially complex and time-consuming task. That's what Certificate Manager is to the Smallstep platform.

When you register a device or workload for management of the Smallstep platform, behind the scene, authorities, provisioners, templates, policies and other stuff are created automatically for you.

Certificate Manager is a big heap of technology that demands you to reason about the design, architecture, and configuration of your PKI yourself. We understand that PKI might not be your primary focus, so instead of diving into certificate intricacies, tell us your certificate-related goals, and we can provide guidance to expedite your journey.