[y4mi]

Well yeah,it's essentially pinned... The client needs a cert signed by the master after all. If you exchange the master cert, the signed certificate is no longer valid

You only need a 'real' CA if your service is public facing.

Heck,even a Windows AD server uses self signed certs

/Edit: after re-reading your comments I get the feeling that were really talking about different things. The self signed certificate becomes the base for your chain of trust. Everything signed by this is allowed to talk to the master. This verification happens on both sides. A client getting an unexpected certificate will refuse to talk to the master just as the master won't talk with a node, unless it's got a signed client cert.

Because the master cert is self signed, it's easier to just throw everything away and recreate the hole chain of trust instead of bothering with revocations.

Finally, there is no benefit in using an official CA if you are in control of everything accessing the resources.

Am I making sense now?

[wyuenho]

This makes more sense, but I'm still confused by that self-signed bit. By master cert, if you mean that's your internal CA's cert that's distributed across every client and server as a part of your trust root, than this makes sense. If you are saying the master self-signed cert is served directly by the orchestration cluster, than this doesn't make sense, as the clients have no way of distinguishing one self-signed cert from another.

[y4mi]

there is no point in importing it. The system store is never referenced in this setup.

The master (this is the self signed part) cert becomes part of the client certs by signing.

These client certs are now only valid with the original self signed cert.

It's essentially a CA, only for the client certificates. It just isn't formalized because it's never imported. you'd also lose the ability to rotate the certs quickly without gaining any security by importing this self signed certificate as a CA.