Last year, I wrote about using Automatic Certs w/ Golang gRPC service on Compute Engine. That solution uses ACME with (the wonderful) Let’s Encrypt. Google is offering a private preview of Automate Public Certificates Lifecycle Management via RFC 8555 (ACME) and, because I’m using Google Cloud Platform extensively to build a “thing” and I think it would be useful to have a backup to Let’s Encrypt, I thought I’d give the solution a try.

I needed to deploy a healthcheck-enabled gRPC TLS-enabled service. Fortunately, most (all?) of the SDKs include an implementation, e.g. Golang has grpc-go/health. I learned in my travels that: DigitalOcean [App] platform does not (link) work with TLS-based gRPC apps. Fly has a regression (link) that breaks gRPC So, I resorted to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Although Cloud Run would be well-suited to running the gRPC app, it uses a proxy|sidecar to provision a cert for the app and I wanted to be able to (easily use a custom domain) and give myself a somewhat general-purpose solution.