I’ve been a loyal fan of Linode for over a decade. Through thick and thin, bare-metal or virtual, they’ve offered a rock-solid platform for hosting infrastructure that scales, delivers, and, most importantly, works. Even now, under the Akamai umbrella, Linode remains a breath of fresh air in an industry bloated with marketing noise and sub-par developer experience.
But there’s one persistent issue that keeps coming back like clockwork, breaking our systems and making us look like amateurs.
Every time the linode-cli is updated, it breaks our Let’s Encrypt certificate renewal flow for NodeBalancers.
And I mean every time.
This isn’t a mild inconvenience or a little warning in a log somewhere. This is production websites going down, customer trust taking a hit, and the dreaded “Not Secure” label slapped across your brand’s front door. It’s embarrassing. It’s damaging. And it’s entirely avoidable.
Let’s break it down.
Our Setup: Clean, Simple, DevOps-Approved
- We use Linode NodeBalancers to front our app servers.
- We use Let’s Encrypt and Certbot for free, trusted SSL/TLS certificates.
- We’ve automated the entire process—from issuing to renewal to updating the NodeBalancer via
linode-cli.
This works beautifully until Linode updates the CLI.
Suddenly, endpoints change, authentication flows shift, parameters are renamed, or dependencies break. We wake up to expired certs, customer complaints, and a firefight that no one needed.
The Hidden Cost of Broken Automation
Every time the CLI update breaks our renewal flow:
- Public-facing services display SSL errors.
- Clients and partners start asking questions.
- Downtime means damage to our brand and potentially lost business.
- Engineers are yanked off real work to fix what was once a fire-and-forget automation.
We’re not a garage startup. We’re handling sensitive data, coordinating across complex enterprise systems, and striving to build trust in a world full of cyber threats. When your SSL breaks, even for a few minutes, you don’t just lose uptime; you lose credibility.
A Call to Action for Akamai/Linode
This is a plea to the folks at Akamai: stop breaking the CLI in ways that cripple certificate renewal processes.
Give us:
- A stable interface for interacting with NodeBalancers, especially for certificate updates.
- Clear, upfront changelogs that call out breaking changes.
- Deprecation warnings and migration paths, not silent breakage.
- Better test coverage and backwards compatibility for mission-critical operations.
Your platform has earned our trust. Don’t erode it with careless breakages that knock out SSL and damage reputations.
Until Then…
We’ll continue firefighting. Writing brittle wrappers. Running certbot renew jobs with crossed fingers. Watching expiry dates like hawks. Phoning Rob Heap and asking for his help to sort it.
But we shouldn’t have to.
The infrastructure is solid. The potential is huge. But we need Linode to take developer experience seriously, especially where security and automation intersect.
