Hi everyone!
In this video I'm going to show you how you can get a free SSL certificate with AWS Certificate
Manager.
But before we get into that, let's take a quick look at what SSL/TLS exactly is.
SSL is a technology that is responsible for the green lock in the address field of your
browser.
You've probably seen this before on ecommerce websites.
The lock basically means that your web browser has assured the identity of the server that
you're talking with and that all data to that web server is encrypted.
So why would you use AWS Certificate Manager?
Well first of all it's free.
Secondly it automatically renews your certificates as they're going to expire and it's integrated
with AWS services so you can generate your certificate and immediately link it up to
a CloudFront distribution.
So what's next in this tutorial?
Well first of all I'm going to request a certificate for my own domain name.
Then we're going to validate that request by email and then finally we're going to enable
the SSL certificate for my CloudFront distribution.
So without further more or do, let's begin!
To start, I'm gonna go to the AWS console and I'm going to scroll down to the "Security
& Identity" section and here I'm going to click on "Certificate Manager" to open its
console.
Right away I'm shown a splash page which explains what certificate manager exactly is.
I'm going to click "Get started" and it automatically starts by requesting a new certificate.
So in my case, I want a certificate for my domainname (savjee.be).
And I also want a wildcard certificate for all the subdomainnames of my website.
So I want one for savjee.be but also for www.savjee.be or anagram.savjee.be or whatever.
So I'm going to type * [dot] and then my domainname to get a wildcard certificate.
So now I'm gonna click "View and request" and I'm going to confirm this request.
Now of course Amazon has to verify that I'm the owner of this domainname.
So to do this, Amazon is going to send a series of emails to all these addresses to confirm
your ownership of this domainname.
So this is the email that Amazon sent me, to verify that I'm the owner of the domainname.
It basically asks me "Hey if you are the owner, and you want to approve this request to get
a certificate, please click this link".
So that's exactly what I'm going to do.
So this opens up an overview page in which Amazon asks you again to verify the information
that they have on you.
I agree on this, so I'm going to click "I approve".
And there you have it: success!
The certificate for my domain name has successfully been approved.
So if I go back to the AWS management console and I go to the certificate manager, I see
that I have one certificate here for my domainname and the status is "Issued".
It's currently not in use though so let's go and fix that.
Let's go to services here and I'm going to link the certificate up with my CloudFront
distribution.
It's remarkably easy.
I'm going to go to savjee.be and I'm going to click "Edit".
Here I can basically select which certificate I want to attach to my distribution.
So I want to use our newly generated certificate.
I'm going to click "Custom SSL certificate" and I've already uploaded a certificate here
in the past but that one has expired.
So I'm going to click on this dropdown menu and here is my newly created certificate.
So I'm going to click on that and I'm going to scroll down to the button and I'm going
to click "Yes, edit".
And now Amazon is going to rollout this change throughout their CDN and in a matter of minutes
my HTTPS certificate will be live for anyone to use.
So I waited a couple of minutes and now I want to know if the SSL certificate is indeed
live.
So to test it, I'm going to go to https://savjee.be and you'll now notice that there is a lock
icon here in the address field, telling me that the communication to this server is indeed
encrypted and secure.
In fact if I click on it, Safari will tell me that it's using an encrypted connection
to my webserver.
I can even verify that that certificate has been signed by Amazon.
So that's it for this tutorial.
Thank you very much for watching!