Matt Barker, co-founder of Jetstack, and Ashley Davis, staff software engineer at Venify, dive into the fascinating journey of cert-manager, an open-source project that revolutionized Kubernetes certificate management. They recount how a job interview challenge sparked its creation, leading to over 500 million downloads monthly. The discussion highlights cert-manager's CNCF graduation, upcoming sub-projects like trust-manager, and the importance of managing machine identities in cloud-native environments, while also addressing the challenges of community engagement and scaling.