I think the less conservative stakeholders here would honestly rather do the six-day thing. They don't view the "still doable by a human" thing as a feature; they'd rather everyone think of certificate management as something that has to be fully automated, much like how humans don't manually respond to HTTP requests. Of course, the idea is not to make every tiny organization come up with a bespoke automation solution; rather, it's to make everyone who writes web server software designed to be exposed to the public internet think of certificate management as included within the scope of problems that are their responsibility to solve, through ACME integration or similar. There isn't any reason in principle why this wouldn't work, and I don't think there'd have been a lot of objections if it had worked this way from the beginning; resistance is coming primarily from stakeholders who don't ever want to change anything as they view it as a pure cost.
(Why not less than six days? Because I think at that point you might start to face some availability tradeoffs even if everything is always fully automated.)
> it creates pressure (oh my.... not the scary yearly certificate renewal, i remember last year we broke something, we i don't remember what...)
Ah yes, let's make a terrible workflow to externally force companies who can't be arsed to document their processes to do things properly, at the expense of everyone else.
a whole month put you in the "if you don't have the resource to automate it, it's still doable by a human, not enough to crush somebody, but still enough to make the option , let's automate fully something to consider"
hence why it's better than a week or a day (it's too much pressure for small companies) better than hours/minutes/secondes (it means you go from 1 year to 'now it must be fully automated right now ! )
a year or two years was not a good idea, because you loose knowledge, it creates pressure (oh my.... not the scary yearly certificate renewal, i remember last year we broke something, we i don't remember what...)
A month, you either start to fully document it, or at least to have it fresh in your mind. A month give you time to everytime think "ok, we have 30 certicates, can't we have a wild card, or a certificate with several domain in it?"
> Perhaps it's time to go with another method entirely.
I think that's the way forward, it's just that it will not happen in one step, and going to one month is a first step.
source: We have to manage a lot of certificate for a lot of different use cases (ssh, mutual ssl for authentification, classical HTTPS certificate etc. ) and we learned the hard way that no 2 years is not better than 1 , and I agree that one month would be better
also https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will...