Using a custom certificate authority

Background Info

When deploying a kops based Kubernetes cluster, kops will generate a Certificate Authority keypair for signing various certificates. In some cases, you may want to provide your own CA keypair.

Building a cluster with a custom CA

The following procedure will allow you to override the CA when creating a cluster. For the sake of this example, you have two files ca.crt and ca.key.

cluster-name.com should be the cluster name you put in the cluster.yaml

kops create -f cluster.yaml
kops create keypair kubernetes-ca --primary --cert ca.crt --key ca.key --name cluster-name.com
kops update cluster --yes

1. First we create the cluster folder structure in the statestore.
2. Second, we create a keypair with the name kubernetes-ca and provide our own values.
3. Last, we run kops update cluster --yes, which will generate all the certificates needed, referencing the keypair called kubernetes-ca we just defined (instead of generating its own).