How to use ca certificate with mysql 8

I'm using a ca certificate for my connection to a digital ocean database cluster from aws. So I'm currently uploading the ca certificate along with all my other code to aws along with the rest of the code. I'm not sure this is the best way to do this - can anyone give me advice about how to do it better? How do you safely integrate secrets like this into your ci/cd and production environment - this would apply to your .env file too.