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> That's an operational reason, though, and not as much a technical one. Every single operational reason is a technical reason if it touches operation of the t

> That's an operational reason, though, and not as much a technical one. Every single operational reason is a technical reason if it touches operation of the technology. > By the way, Caddy CAN store certs in a database accessed by multiple servers. It coordinates cert management when configured as a cluster, automatically. Caddy is the only server that does this (for free An edge web server should carry no knowledge of a concept of a cluster. It should simply be able to ask something for a cert. Otherwise it is a screw that insists that in order for it be used in high rise, it needs to be used in a specific pattern that the screw designer envisioned. If you want to make Caddy easily adoptable in high rises I suggest the following path: 1. Subscribe to events saying "fetch this cert from here" 2. Emit events saying "Need to renew X" when you need to renew. 3. Create ability to forward renew requests to renew requests processor. 4. Make request processor update the cert store and emit the event that the key pair is available.

mholt 7y ago
> An edge web server should carry no knowledge of a concept of a cluster. Caddy doesn't. That's what's so interesting! > It should simply be able to ask something for a cert. It does. > I suggest the following path: Oh good! That's pretty close to how it actually works already! I'm happy to explain more how Caddy actually works before we start armchairing solutions here. Or, feel free to read the code for yourself: https://github.com/mholt/certmagic/ https://github.com/mholt/certmagic/
jrockway 7y ago
I think the problem that most people have is that they have no way to orchestrate multiple components, so they really want everything built into one binary. Once you can run multiple processes and have service discovery, the need for this stuff goes away. For example, I use cert-manager to get certificates for my Envoy edge proxy. cert-manager runs continuously and updates the TLS certificates in a Kubernetes secret. Kubernetes injects the secret into the Envoy container as files, and then Envoy reads them without any knowledge of where they come from or how they can be renewed. (It could also be configured to get them at runtime with xDS / Universal Data Plane API). This is all very easy and provides infinite interchangeability; there would be no change in cert provisioning necessary if I switched to Nginx or HAProxy. But, most people don't have a setup that supports something like this, so they really need the all-in-one thing or they're just going to say "we don't really need TLS". They get by because nothing in their infrastructure ever changes; certs are new because they require operator intervention every 90 days and that is a new experience. It is unfortunate, but that's where most of the world is at right now.
- notyourday 7y ago
  Agreed. However if an author of the solution does insist on implementing it in one binary with orchestration step being in the code rather than pulled out into the infrastructure management, the author should not be surprised that no one outside tiny single server operations would consider it to be a contender.
  - mholt 7y ago
    Your logic assumes that Caddy's auto-HTTPS cannot be configured and must be self-contained, but that's not accurate. Caddy can be configured with traditional, manually-managed (or externally-managed) TLS certificates just like other web servers too, if you need that. All we're saying with this project is, "There is a better way going forward, and we're solving that problem."
    - notyourday 7y ago
      You are presuming that as a designer of the Caddy you understand how the non-single-VM customers are running their infrastructure. Here's a typical problem of a distributed entry point system - network partitioning. * If your key/cert store relies on key servers being always accessible from everywhere, it simply won't work. * If your solution is to bake a key into a file system, then it is no better than existing nginx implementation. Basically, if you want your solution to be adopted, it needs to be significantly better than the entrenched ones.
  - jrockway 7y ago
    Yeah, I think that's a fine analysis. I don't think Caddy cares that it's not the "right way" if it solves problems for some people. It is certainly easier than certbot and nginx for cases where you have one VM that you play with as though it's a pet. And a lot of people treat their production environments that way, so it does solve a problem. The next problem that people will run into is that because they can't reliably run multiple "things", they won't have a monitoring stack to tell them that certs aren't renewing. But, maybe nothing bad will happen and it won't be a problem. "Hope is not a strategy" if you're a Google SRE, but people do pretty OK with hope in the real world ;)

mholt 7y ago

> An edge web server should carry no knowledge of a concept of a cluster. Caddy doesn't. That's what's so interesting! > It should simply be able to ask something for a cert. It does. > I suggest the following path: Oh good! That's pretty close to how it actually works already! I'm happy to explain more how Caddy actually works before we start armchairing solutions here. Or, feel free to read the code for yourself: https://github.com/mholt/certmagic/ https://github.com/mholt/certmagic/

jrockway 7y ago

I think the problem that most people have is that they have no way to orchestrate multiple components, so they really want everything built into one binary. Once you can run multiple processes and have service discovery, the need for this stuff goes away. For example, I use cert-manager to get certificates for my Envoy edge proxy. cert-manager runs continuously and updates the TLS certificates in a Kubernetes secret. Kubernetes injects the secret into the Envoy container as files, and then Envoy reads them without any knowledge of where they come from or how they can be renewed. (It could also be configured to get them at runtime with xDS / Universal Data Plane API). This is all very easy and provides infinite interchangeability; there would be no change in cert provisioning necessary if I switched to Nginx or HAProxy. But, most people don't have a setup that supports something like this, so they really need the all-in-one thing or they're just going to say "we don't really need TLS". They get by because nothing in their infrastructure ever changes; certs are new because they require operator intervention every 90 days and that is a new experience. It is unfortunate, but that's where most of the world is at right now.

notyourday 7y ago
Agreed. However if an author of the solution does insist on implementing it in one binary with orchestration step being in the code rather than pulled out into the infrastructure management, the author should not be surprised that no one outside tiny single server operations would consider it to be a contender.
- mholt 7y ago
  Your logic assumes that Caddy's auto-HTTPS cannot be configured and must be self-contained, but that's not accurate. Caddy can be configured with traditional, manually-managed (or externally-managed) TLS certificates just like other web servers too, if you need that. All we're saying with this project is, "There is a better way going forward, and we're solving that problem."
  - notyourday 7y ago
    You are presuming that as a designer of the Caddy you understand how the non-single-VM customers are running their infrastructure. Here's a typical problem of a distributed entry point system - network partitioning. * If your key/cert store relies on key servers being always accessible from everywhere, it simply won't work. * If your solution is to bake a key into a file system, then it is no better than existing nginx implementation. Basically, if you want your solution to be adopted, it needs to be significantly better than the entrenched ones.
- jrockway 7y ago
  Yeah, I think that's a fine analysis. I don't think Caddy cares that it's not the "right way" if it solves problems for some people. It is certainly easier than certbot and nginx for cases where you have one VM that you play with as though it's a pet. And a lot of people treat their production environments that way, so it does solve a problem. The next problem that people will run into is that because they can't reliably run multiple "things", they won't have a monitoring stack to tell them that certs aren't renewing. But, maybe nothing bad will happen and it won't be a problem. "Hope is not a strategy" if you're a Google SRE, but people do pretty OK with hope in the real world ;)