Speaking of SSL certificates, Amazon has rolled out the Amazon Certificate Manager – a free service that lets you deploy SSL certificates which you can utilize with AWS services. Oh, did I mention – it’s free! The downside being that ACM (Amazon Certificate Manager) is currently only available in the Northern Virginia region – however Amazon will surely roll this out world wide shortly.
“SSL/TLS is a must-have whenever sensitive data is moved back and forth,” explained Chief Evangelist at Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr on the company’s blog. “For example, sites that need to meet compliance requirements such as PCI-DSS, FISMA, and HIPAA make extensive use of SSL/TLS. Certificates are issued to specific domains by Certificate Authorities, also known as CAs. When you want to obtain a certificate for your site, the CA will confirm that you are responsible for the domain. Then it will issue a certificate that is valid for a specific amount of time, and only for the given domain (subdomains are allowed). Traditionally, you were also responsible for installing the certificate on your system, tracking expiration dates, and getting fresh certificates from time to time (typically, certificates are valid for a period of 12 months)”.
Apart from being free, and already integrated with all AWS services, getting and installing these SSL certificates is much easier than usual. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can quickly request a trusted SSL/TLS certificate from AWS. Once the certificate is approved, AWS Certificate Manager takes care of deploying certificates, to help you enable SSL/TLS for your website or application.
Check out the AWS Certificate Manager here, and deploy a free SSL certificate!