# cert-manager v1.21.0-alpha.0

- Product: cert-manager (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/cert-manager)
- Vendor: CNCF
- Date: 2026-03-24
- Version: v1.21.0-alpha.0
- Original notes: https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/tag/v1.21.0-alpha.0
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/cert-manager/releases/v1.21.0-alpha.0
- Labels: Pre-release

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **added** — Add certificate renewal policies
- **changed** — Promote CAInjectorMerging feature gate to GA
- **fixed** — Fix duplicate parentRef bug when both issuer config and annotations are present
- **removed** — Remove deprecated ObjectReference

cert-manager is the easiest way to automatically manage certificates in Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters.

> ⚠️ This is a pre-release. For testing only!

##### Changes by Kind since `v1.20.0`

###### Feature

- Feat(certificate): adding certificate renewal policies (#8258, @hjoshi123)
- Promote the CAInjectorMerging feature gate to GA (#8583, @Copilot)

###### Bug or Regression

- Fixed duplicate `parentRef` bug when both issuer config and annotations are present. (#8619, @hjoshi123)

###### Other (Cleanup or Flake)

- API cleanup: removed deprecated ObjectReference (#8625, @inteon)