Amazon AWS: Free SSL Certificates and Renewals

Maintaining SSL certificates used to be the bane of my existence mainly because it is ALWAYS crazy different depending on where you are deploying, what OS, whether or not you have openSSL installed etc….

Reason #42 why I love AWS ? SSL certs are free, and easy to manage now.
How do I acquire this great sweetness, you ask?

1. ACM (Amazon Certificate Manager)

Log into your AWS console and under the list of services is “Certificate Manager.” Click it!

2. Type in the domain you want to secure.

I HIGHLY recommend you use *.yourdomain.com which creates a wildcard cert, and will work for any host you decide to come up with later. Click “Review and Request” to continue, and then “Confirm and Request” to get things going.

3. Amazon send an email for approval

The email goes to the owner of the domain (it IS you, right ?) and also sends it to webmaster@yourdomain and a few other common administrator addresses with a simple request to approve the SSL cert.

4. Use it!

Once the cert is approved, it is SUPER easy to use with your load balancer. Go to your EC2 Dashboard, scroll down and click on “Load Balancers.” Add or edit the HTTPS / Port 443 settings, and under SSL certificate, choose your new cert from the ACM drop-down!

And its that easy! This is a great value-add that somehow missed my radar when they announced it. Being able to quickly provision an SSL cert is nice, but the auto-renewals, and all for free? That is icing. Plus it works for free tier service! Just great for startups!

Yet another reason to love Amazon AWS. Thanks Amazon AWS for the developer-friendly love!