AWS Certificate Manager

Certificate Manager is a service where you can request free SSL/TLS certificates to make your website support HTTPS. A certificate used to be an expensive purchase for small sites, ranging from US$ 100 to US$ 500 per year. To help make certificates (and HTTPS) accessible to everyone, Let's Encrypt (https://letsencrypt.org) was created as a nonprofit certificate authority company, which operates based on donations and sponsorship. You can get free certificates and they will be accepted by all major browsers.

Following Let's Encrypt, Amazon launched its own service named AWS Certificate Manager. It's restricted to AWS customers, but it's also free and easier to use. Once you issue a new certificate and associate it with a CloudFront distribution, Amazon will also be responsible by automatically renewing the certificate when necessary. We will cover this service in Chapter 4, Hosting the Website.