You're on your way to distributed security bliss.

The step toolchain is a suite of open source software that makes it easy to manage end-to-end encryption in distributed systems. At its core is an online certificate authority—a private self-hosted service that bears responsibility for issuing, renewing, and revoking certificates for all the systems, applications, and people across your organization.

This guide will get you up and running with the smallstep certificate authority—step-ca—and walk you through the process of securely connecting two things (a server and a client) in your infrastructure.