Do you promise to come back and tell us the story about when someone went on vacation and the certs issued on a Thursday didn't renew over the weekend and come Monday everything broke and no one could authenticate or get into the building?
I applaud you for sticking to your guns though.
And the conventional wisdom for application management and deployments is - if it's painful, do it more. Like this, applications in the container infrastructure are forced to get certificate deployment and reloading right on day 1.
And yes, some older application that were migrated to the infrastructure went ahead and loaded their credentials and certificates for other dependencies into their database or something like that and then ended up confused when this didn't work at all. Now it's fixed.
Except there are no APIs to rotate those. The infrastructure doesn't exist yet.
And refreshing those automatically does not validate ownership, unlike certificates where you can do a DNS check or an HTTP check.
Microsoft has some technology that next to these tokens they also have a per-machine certificate that is used to sign requests, and those certificates can't leave the machine.
Because we run on Azure / AKS, switching to federated credentials ("workload identities") with the app registrations made most of the pain go away because MS manages all the rotations (3 months) etc. If you're on managed AKS the OIDC issuer side is also automagic. And it's free. I think GCP offers something similar.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/workload-id/workload...
It's been a huge pain as we have encountered a ton of bugs and missing features in libraries and applications to reload certs like this. And we have some really ugly workarounds in place, because some applications place a "reload a consul client" on the same level of "reload all config, including opening new sockets, adjusting socket parameters, doing TCP connection handover" - all to rebuild a stateless client throwing a few parameters at a standard http client. But oh well.
But I refuse to back down. Reload your certs and your secrets. If we encounter a situation in which we have to mass-revoke and mass-reissue internal certs, it'll be easy for those who do. I don't have time for everyone else.