Lets see what are the services which can be integrated with ACM (AWS Certificate Manager). This could be one of the interview question so lets learn the services together with some basic details about ACM:-
What is ACM
AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) is a service that simplifies the process of managing SSL/TLS certificates for your AWS-based applications and websites. SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the internet as well as resources on private networks.
Key features the ACM provides:-
- Certificate Issuance- ACM offers automatic issuance of SSL/TLS certificates and its a free service. You only need to pay for the AWS resources you use for your application.
- Auto Renewal - IF you are using SSL/TLS certificates from ACM then it gives you auto renewal facility without any hassle.
- Easy Cert Management - ACM provides easy centralized management console to view and manage your certificates.
- Import Third Part Cert - You can easily import SSL/TLS certificate from third part too and store in ACM. However, there is no auto-renewal facility for 3rd party certificate in ACM, but you can still automate the renewal process.
ACM can support following services
1) AWS CDN - Also knows as Amazon CloudFront, which is a content delivery network, designed to deliver content with low latency and very high speed.
Use Case - Integrate with ACM to distribute content globally in a secure HTTPS manner. Benefit of this is to utilize SSL/TLS cert for secure content delivery to the worldwide user base.
2) ELB - Know as Elastic Load Balancer. AWS ELB is used to balanced the incoming traffic across multiple targets such as EC2 instance.
Use Case - To distribute secure traffic, load balancer required to install SSL/TLS certificate. ACM integrates with Application load balancer or Network load balancer to encrypt the traffic.
3) Amazon API Gateway - It's a serverless fully managed service provided by AWS that allows us to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.
Use Case - After API deployment, you can use custom domain name to access it and that domain name can be integrated with SSL/TLS certificates to securely connect your API with back end service and for that we can use ACM service.
4) AWS Elastic Beanstalk - Another AWS fully managed service which makes it easier for anyone to deploy, manage, scale web applications without worrying about the infrastructure. It reduces infrastructure complexity which actually helps the developers to focus on writing code and deploy the application.
Use Case - Elastic Beanstalk use elastic load balancer and there can be easily configure SSL/TLS for your Elastic Beanstalk environments to secure traffic.
5) AWS CloudFormation - Its a Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) which allows you to define and provision AWS infrastructure using code. It allows to create a template that automatically provisions and configures AWS resources as specified in the template, handling dependencies and order of operations.
Use Case - Automate the provisioning and updating of ACM certificates as part of your CloudFormation templates.
6) AWS CloudWatch - Its a monitoring service which helps us to monitor and manage your applications by collecting and tracking metrics, collecting and monitoring log files, and setting alarms in case of any notification & further action.
Use Case - ACM usually Integrate with CloudWatch for monitoring certificate metrics and setting up alarms for certificate expiry.
7) AWS OpsWorks - It is an configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet, which are automation platforms that allow us to automate how servers are configured, deployed, and managed.
Use Case - To automate operational tasks on AWS resources. Use ACM certificates to secure OpsWorks Stacks and manage SSL/TLS certificates automatically.
Rest of the other services mentioned in the diagram are also using ACM somewhere in a similar fashion.
Conclusion
Overall, AWS Certificate Manager is a key service offered by AWS for managing SSL/TLS certificates effortlessly across AWS services. Whether you’re securing a global content delivery network, API endpoints, load-balanced applications, or any other services, ACM has got you covered
Happy Learning!!
Top comments (2)
This is a great overview of AWS Certificate Manager and its integrations! I'm curious, how do ACM's automatic renewal processes work for certificates?
@youngfra, Thanks for reading the post. I am glad you like it.
One of the great feature of ACM is to automatically renew certificates before they expire if you are using certificates directly from ACM. Not only this, ACM also notify us in advance based on number of days configured. However, If you import the cert into ACM from third party provider (such as GoDaddy, DigiCert) then manual renewal is required. I will post step by step process of renewal very soon on this platform. Thank you.