AWS Certificate Manager Technology Intelligence

What is AWS Certificate Manager?

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) is Amazon Web Services' managed service for provisioning, managing, and deploying SSL/TLS certificates. ACM provides free public certificates for use with AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, API Gateway, and Elastic Beanstalk.

The service handles the complexity of certificate management, including automatic renewal of ACM-issued certificates before expiration. This eliminates the manual processes of purchasing, uploading, and renewing certificates that traditionally burden operations teams.

ACM certificates are domain-validated (DV) certificates issued by Amazon's certificate authority, which is trusted by all major browsers. For organizations requiring Organization Validation (OV) or Extended Validation (EV) certificates, ACM supports importing certificates from third-party CAs.

AWS Certificate Manager Features

Free Certificates: No cost for ACM-issued certs. Unlimited quantity. Free renewals. No per-certificate fees.

Automatic Renewal: Certificates renew automatically. No manual intervention. Continuous protection. No downtime.

Domain Validation: DNS validation (recommended). Email validation option. Automated verification. Quick issuance.

Wildcard Support: *.example.com certificates. Subdomain coverage. SAN (Subject Alternative Names). Multiple domains.

AWS Integration: CloudFront. Elastic Load Balancer. API Gateway. Elastic Beanstalk. AppSync.

Private CA: ACM Private CA. Internal certificates. Custom CA hierarchy. Enterprise PKI.

AWS Certificate Manager Use Cases

Load Balancers: ALB/NLB SSL termination. HTTPS listeners. End-to-end encryption. Multi-certificate support.

CloudFront: CDN HTTPS. Custom domains. Origin SSL. Edge locations.

API Gateway: Custom domain APIs. Regional and edge endpoints. HTTPS APIs. REST API security.

Multi-Region: Certificates per region. Global applications. Disaster recovery. Regional redundancy.

Private PKI: Internal services. Microservice mTLS. IoT device certificates. Private applications.

Certificate Import: Third-party certificates. EV/OV requirements. Existing certificates. Migration.

AWS Certificate Manager Code Examples

AWS CLI Commands

# Request a new certificate
aws acm request-certificate \
    --domain-name example.com \
    --subject-alternative-names www.example.com \
    --validation-method DNS \
    --region us-east-1

# List certificates
aws acm list-certificates --region us-east-1

# Describe certificate
aws acm describe-certificate \
    --certificate-arn arn:aws:acm:us-east-1:123456789:certificate/abc123

# Import third-party certificate
aws acm import-certificate \
    --certificate fileb://certificate.pem \
    --private-key fileb://private-key.pem \
    --certificate-chain fileb://chain.pem

Terraform Configuration

# Request ACM certificate
resource "aws_acm_certificate" "main" {
  domain_name               = "example.com"
  subject_alternative_names = ["www.example.com"]
  validation_method         = "DNS"

  lifecycle {
    create_before_destroy = true
  }
}

# DNS validation record
resource "aws_route53_record" "cert_validation" {
  for_each = {
    for dvo in aws_acm_certificate.main.domain_validation_options : dvo.domain_name => {
      name   = dvo.resource_record_name
      record = dvo.resource_record_value
      type   = dvo.resource_record_type
    }
  }
  zone_id = aws_route53_zone.main.id
  name    = each.value.name
  type    = each.value.type
  records = [each.value.record]
  ttl     = 60
}

AWS Certificate Manager Benefits

Cost Effective: Free public certificates. No renewal costs. No quantity limits. Reduced overhead.

Automated: Automatic renewal. No manual steps. Reduced errors. Operational simplicity.

AWS Native: Deep integration. One-click deployment. Consistent management. AWS Console.

Secure: Private keys protected. Never exposed. AWS managed. HSM storage.

Scalable: Unlimited certificates. Multi-region. High availability. Enterprise scale.

Compliance: SOC, PCI, HIPAA. Audit logging. CloudTrail integration. Governance.