In the world of web infrastructure, what starts as a simple goal can often lead you down a fascinating rabbit hole of history, philosophy, and clever engineering. This is the story of our journey to build a simple, single-purpose, open-source CDN for changelog.com and the one major hurdle that stood in our way: Varnish, our HTTP caching layer of choice, doesn't support TLS backends.

Enter Nabeel Sulieman, a shipit.show guest, who had previously introduced us to KCert, a simpler alternative to cert-manager. We knew if anyone could help us solve this TLS conundrum, it was him. After a couple of false starts, we finally recorded the final solution. As Nabeel aptly put it: Third time is the charm.

🍿 This entire conversation is available to Make it Work members as full videos served from the CDN, and also a Jellyfin media server: makeitwork.tv/i-love-tls 👈 Scroll to the bottom of the page for CDN & media server info

LINKS

• 🐙 github.com/thechangelog/pipely pull-request #8
• 🐙 github.com/nabsul/tls-exterminator 
• 👀 Varnish - Why no SSL?
• 🚲 PHKs Bikeshed
• 🏡 bikeshed.org

EPISODE CHAPTERS

• (00:00) - How this started