What is TLS/SSL and why is it important for DevOps engineers to understand it?

Easy Topic: System Design May 24, 2026

TLS (Transport Layer Security) encrypts communication between clients and servers, preventing eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks. It replaced the deprecated SSL protocol.

DevOps engineers encounter TLS in:

Configuring HTTPS for web services (Let’s Encrypt, ACM in AWS)
Kubernetes Ingress TLS termination
mTLS between microservices (Istio, Linkerd)
Certificate rotation — expired certs cause outages
Internal PKI for service-to-service auth

Automate certificate renewal with cert-manager in Kubernetes or AWS Certificate Manager. Never let certificates expire manually.

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