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Zero Trust at Shopify Scale: Automating MTLS Across Thousands of Services#

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 (London) digest Program Core pick London · 1–4 April 2025

Abstract Recording

Dani Santos & Michelle Mali, Shopify — Core

Play the recording: Zero Trust at Shopify Scale: Automating MTLS Across Thousands of Services

  • Why: A real production account — with failure modes, not just success framing — of the operational problem every SPIFFE/SPIRE or cert-manager deployment eventually hits: rotating certificates across thousands of services without an outage.
  • What: How Shopify automates mTLS certificate lifecycle (issuance, rotation, cross-cluster distribution) at thousands-of-services scale, including the evolution of their approach and the failure modes they hit along the way. (from abstract only)
  • How: Evolved from custom admission controllers to patterns that work across Kubernetes and non-Kubernetes environments — mounting CA certificates at container startup with periodic CronJob-driven renewal, plus RBAC and graceful rollover mechanisms. (from abstract only)
  • Where applicable: General mTLS-at-scale problem; the specific CronJob-renewal pattern is one implementation choice among several, useful as a reference for anyone hitting cert-rotation pain at scale.