Automated SSL/TLS certificate creation for 100 Docker applications, ensuring secure connections across Ubuntu Linux hosts.

Situation. A hundred Docker applications all needed SSL/TLS certificates, and certificates are the kind of thing that’s fine right up until they aren’t. Issuing and renewing a hundred of them by hand is slow, it’s dull, and it’s exactly the sort of manual job where one forgotten renewal takes an app down with an expiry error at the worst possible moment.

Task. The goal was certificate creation and renewal automated — every app with valid, trusted encryption, and nobody having to remember to do anything.

Action. An ACME‑based workflow handled the whole lifecycle for the hundred Docker applications — creating the certificates and renewing them before they lapsed — and deployed them automatically across the Ubuntu Linux hosts, which were running a mix of Apache and Nginx. The whole aim was to take the human out of it, because the human is the part that forgets.

Result. All hundred applications kept valid certificates and secure connections on their own. The manual certificate work just disappeared, and with it the whole category of outage where something breaks not because it failed but because a cert quietly expired and nobody noticed.