I have a EC2 instance running in my account, now I need to add an SSL certificate to my web server running inside that EC2 instance.
Can I create a new cloudfront and attach my existing EC2 instance to it? Would that solve my purpose?
Yes, you make CloudFront point to an EC2 instance or any server really. Check out Requiring HTTPS for Communication Between Viewers and CloudFront for more information on how to do this.
Another option for free SSL certificates is Let’s Encrypt. Super easy to setup and works with Apache and Nginx.
Related
I've an app running on AWS.
Currently, my frontend is hosted on S3/cloudfront which communicates with my EC2 instance through a Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).
ELB handles the SSL certificate.
I just have one EC2 instance. So, I don't really need the ELB. My free tier period is over... ELB representer 40% of my bill !
How can I get rid of ELB without losing the SSL configuration ?
Thanks in advance !
The best approach to keep an AWS ACM SSL whilst removing your load balancer would be to instead use CloudFront for your EC2 host.
If this is a different domain to your existing CloudFront distribution, you would need to create a new one which will serve your app traffic. This would have a custom origin that would resolve to the public CNAME of the EC2 host (this will require the EC2 host to be publicly resolvable).
IF it shares the same domain, your CloudFront distribution would need to be updated to include a secondary behaviour that maps to your EC2 hosts public hostname.
Please note for this option your instance must be public, this means that it is possibly to bypass CloudFront to perform this option. If you do not have a valid SSL on this EC2 host you will need to configure the CloudFront distribution to speak to the origin using HTTP.
An alternative (or combined option) would be to use a service such as certbot that can generate a valid SSL for your domain. This will ensure any public ingress to the instance can be encrypted securely over HTTPS.
We have a project and we are working on creating bulk Ec2 t2.micro instances on demand. The automation process would be
Creating an instance
update the DNS zone with Correct public IP
Get Lets encrypt latest certificate.
We are using Jenkins and Ansible for this task. do you guys think if there is any better or easy approach then this.
The issues of an automated creation and management of instance and a static public IP can be solved by means of Elastic Beanststalk (EB).
EB also gives you a DNS name for free, but this is AWS DNS. If you want to use your custom domain for DNS, you can use Route53 for that as explained here.
SSL certificate depends on your EB environment. If you choose to use EB with load-balancer, then you can easly get free public SSL cert using ACM. If you don't want load balancer, you can install free public certificate from LetsEncrypt. But you have to manually set it up on your EB instance.
Say I have an AWS ec2 instance that is running a python application on a certain port say 8000. Also imagine I have a domain name say www.abcd.com that I own. What does it take to make my website use https and securely redirect to the app on my ec2 that is listening on port 8000? Is this even possible to do or do I need something like nginx in between?
Firstly you will need to ensure that your EC2 is in a public subnet with a public IP, it will also need its security group open on whatever port you are hitting it on (8000). At this point you should be able to hit your application on public ip:port.
Now if you want to do the above while using a domain you will want to use AWS's Route 53 service. From this you can create a DNS routing using your domain. You will want to create a route from: application.example.com to your instances public ip. After doing so you should be able to visit: application.example.com and hit your application. In doing the following it is possible now to make your EC2 instance private.
Now if you wish to include HTTPS ontop of this, the best way would be to create a public load balancer with a certificate attached, this would accept HTTPS traffic from your user, then forward that traffic over HTTP to your EC2 on a selected port (8000).
After doing this you will want to change your Route53 entry to point to your load balancer instead of directly at your EC2.
Yes, it is totally possible.
Here is step wise procedure to do it :-
you need to create hosted zone on Route-53 services of amazon
Then it use ns to connect with your domain ( wherever you have registered)
Then you need to connect your ec2 instance ip with your hosted zone
Now you can access your ec2 instances using this domain, but it will be not https
For https, you need certificate, which you can avail from aws certificate-manager
After obtaining the certificate, Follow the steps from this blog How to set up HTTPS for your domain on AWS.
NOTE:- This is just uber point, follow it and look for more insight to how you exactly do it in your case. I followed this step while deploying using elastic-beanstalk.
I am spinning a new EC2 instance on demand using AMI by script using Java SDK from here at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-java/v1/developer-guide/welcome.html
I am hosting rest API's on the newly spun EC2 instance from AMI on port 8000. I want to access instance from IP only as I will spinning many instances from base AMI when needed and will be destroying when not needed.
I want to call this API's from another web application which is hosted under HTTPS. I know it will not allow me to hit HTTP from HTTPS due to Mixed Content.
After some research, I found AWS provides ACM-Server Certificates service which can be applied to EC2. Ref http://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-java/v1/developer-guide/examples-iam-server-certificates.html
But it works with services integrated with ACM as per document saying at below link
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-services.html >>
You cannot install an ACM Certificate directly on your website or
application. You must install your certificate by using one of the
services integrated with ACM. For more information about these
services, see Services Integrated with AWS Certificate Manager.
Elastic Load Balancing
Amazon CloudFront
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Amazon API Gateway AWS
CloudFormation
But I am not using any of above-mentioned services. Is there any way to achieve this and install SSSL on EC2 ip using script ?
This is a common question, because AWS ACS certificates are free.
Thus, to avoid using such certificates with other services than AWS ones, AWS never discloses the associated private keys to its customers.
To let the https server on your EC2 instance use such a certificate, AWS should give you the private key, for you to configure the https server itself.
This is why you can not use an ACS certificate with your EC2 instance. You need to configure an Elastic Load Balancing instance in front of it, so that AWS provides this ELB with your certificate and private key (or provide an HSM with this private key and connect this HSM to the ELB front-end).
Note that using an ELB instance in front of your EC2 instance, in order to be able to use a free certificate from the AWS ACS service, is probably a bad idea: certificates are often cheaper (depending on their type and duration, of course) than the ELB cost overhead.
Note that Let'sEncrypt (https://letsencrypt.org/) can provide your EC2 instance with free DV (domain validated) certificates. You just need to install the Certbot ACME client, since you have shell access to your EC2 instance.
AWS has come up with a new service AWS Certificate Manager. One thing I got from the description is that if we are using this service we don't have to pay for the certificate anymore.
They are providing certificates for Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and CloudFront, but I didn't find EC2 anywhere.
Is there any way to use the certificate with EC2?
Q: Can I use certificates on Amazon EC2 instances or on my own servers?
No. At this time, certificates provided by ACM can only be used with specific AWS services.
Q: With which AWS services can I use certificates provided by ACM?
You can use ACM with the following AWS services:
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Amazon CloudFront
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Amazon API Gateway
https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/faqs/
You can't install the certificates created by Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) on resources you have direct low-level access to, like EC2 or servers outside of AWS, because you aren't provided with access to the private keys. These certs can only be deployed on resources managed by the AWS infrastructure -- ELB and CloudFront -- because the AWS infrastructure holds the only copies of the private keys for the certificates that it generates, and maintains them under tight security with auditable internal access controls.
You'd have to have your EC2 machines listening behind CloudFront or ELB (or both, cascaded, would also work) in order to use these certs for content coming from EC2... because you can't install these certs directly on EC2 machines.
No, you cannot use aws certificate manager for deploying certs on EC2. The certificate manager certs can only be deployed against cloudfront and elastic load balancer. Inoredr to use it on ec2, you need to put elb on top of ec2, so that request from client to load balancer will be https protected and from elb to ec2 webserver will be on http.
If you are using AWS ACM Cert for internal purpose only then you could probably use AWS ACM Private CA to issue the certs.(I think you can use it for public/external traffic purpose as well if your root CA is publicly trusted CA).
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm-pca/latest/userguide/PcaGetStarted.html
During Application/EC2/Container startup, set a step to export your ACM Private CA issued Cert/Private Key to your destination and start referring that for serving the traffic.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/acm/export-certificate.html
One good thing is, you can control who can call export cert feature using IAM Role so not everyone can download private key of the cert.
One downside with this is, private CA is expensive AWS service($400/month).
https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/pricing/
Adding to the comments above, you can't use the AWS Certificate Manager for this, but you can add a Let's Encrypt certificate to ec2 on a Windows server running IIS and it's pretty easy:
Associate an elastic ip with your ec2 instance.
Make sure you have a registered domain. You can't use ec2----------.us-east-1.compute.amazonaws.com type names that come with your instance.
Through your domain provider's DNS settings have your domain point to your Elastic IP.
Connect to your ec2 instance and add your domain name to the site bindings.
Go to https://github.com/PKISharp/win-acme/releases
Look under assets, and use the latest version (win-acme.v2.0.10.444.zip for example). This is the only assets folder that you need.
Unzip the folder, open the terminal as administrator, and cd into the unzipped folder.
Run wacs.exe and follow the prompts.
Make sure the security group assigned to your instance allows traffic (at the very least your own IP) through the HTTPS port you chose in IIS; this is port 443 by default.
I found the links below helpful when I was figuring this out. Here is a video using an earlier release if you need more help, but it's the same idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq5OUOjumuM
Also this article might be helpful:
https://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2016/feb/22/using-lets-encrypt-with-iis-on-windows