cert-manager graduation announcement

Signed-off-by: Ashley Davis <[email protected]>

content/announcements/2024-11-12-cert-manager-graduation.md

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+---
+slug: cert-manager-graduation
+title: cert-manager is now a CNCF Graduated Project!
+description: cert-manager joins Kubernetes itself at the Graduated level of the CNCF
+date: "2024-11-12T09:00:00Z"
+---
+
+The 28th of November 2023 was an important day for the cert-manager project. We [raised](https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/1212) our first issue on the road to becoming a CNCF Graduated project,
+which then grew into [another issue](https://github.com/cncf/toc/issues/1306), a [security audit](./2024-03-18-cert-manager-security-audit.md) and lots of [due diligence](https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/1416)
+over the following months.
+
+We took that step towards graduation chiefly because being Graduated is the highest rung of the ladder that CNCF projects climb.
+
+There's no higher level - Kubernetes itself is a CNCF Graduated project, along with other incredibly impactful and [noteworthy projects](https://www.cncf.io/projects/) such as Istio, Cilium, Linkerd and SPIFFE.
+
+We're now incredibly proud to announce that the 12th of November 2024 is also an important day for cert-manager; we're now officially a CNCF Graduated Project!
+
+The CNCF describes graduated projects as:
+
+> Projects considered stable, widely adopted, and production ready, attracting thousands of contributors
+
+We believe this description reflects cert-manager's place in the Cloud Native landscape. We've met hundreds of people at different KubeCon events who've told us that rely on cert-manager
+in production across thousands of Kubernetes clusters. We treasure the trust that people place in us, and we remain dedicated to making cert-manager rock solid.
+
+Graduation isn't just the end of a long process, though - it's a chance to reaffirm our commitment to solving the problem of X.509 in Kubernetes.
+
+There are interesting challenges ahead for cert-manager, and we're excited to be part of the solution.
+
+First, consider quantum computers promising to break existing encryption. The process of migrating to post-quantum cryptography has already begun,
+and cert-manager stands ready to adopt standards when they're ready.
+
+Second, think about the threat-strewn landscape of trust in Kubernetes containers today. trust-manager is growing rapidly, and we think it can
+help not only to manage everyday trust bundles but also to increase response times for fixing trust issues in Kubernetes.
+
+And of course, machine identities - including X.509 certs - are only proliferating faster as time goes on. cert-manager is ready to scale with that growth!
+
+We'd like to finish by saying some thank yous:
+
+First, we'd like to thank Katie Gamanji who helped to shepherd our project through the graduation process; we quite literally couldn't have
+finished the process without her.
+
+Second, we'd like to thank all those who were involved in helping during the process, including those who were interviewed,
+tag-security and tag-contributor-strategy, and many others for their feedback and advice.
+
+Third, we'd like to thank Venafi for sponsoring the bulk of maintainer time required to see this process through.
+
+Finally, thank you all for using cert-manager and being such a great community!
+
+We're actively looking for more contributors, maintainers, and feedback from users; please reach out on Slack or join one of our regular meetings if you're interested in getting involved!
+
+Happy graduation to cert-manager!
+
+- The cert-manager Maintainers
+