
Certificates are the socks of IT—everyone needs them, and you always lose track of a few. On today's show we dive into the ACME protocol, an IETF standard to help automate how a domain owner gets a domain validation certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA). Our guest, Ed Harmoush, demystifies the ACME protocol and the Let’s Encrypt service, which uses the ACME protocol. Ed discusses ACME clients and servers and walks us step-by-step through how the protocol works. He also explains how certificate automation can save your sanity by eliminating "calendar roulette."