14 DAY TRIAL // Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at Amazon Web Services (AWS), has announced the public availability of AWS Certificate Manager, a service that will provide free SSL/TLS certificates for all of the company's AWS users.
Amazon entered the HTTPS market last June when it applied to become an official SSL certificate provider for Android and Firefox, and later for Apple and Microsoft.
After receiving its CA (Certificate Authority) status, industry experts were all waiting for Amazon to announce a business venture that would put the company in direct opposition with companies like Comodo or Symantec.
Well, the service is here, but it's not a commercial endeavor, as many industry specialists expected in the beginning. Instead, AWS customers had a surprise, Amazon announcing they'll receive free SSL certificates for their AWS accounts.
AWS Certificate Manager is free for all AWS customers
The AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) service is modeled after the Let's Encrypt project, which entered public beta last month. ACM is extremely easy to use and has been specifically built this way to simplify the process of deploying fully-working SSL certificates to live, production-ready websites and cloud applications.
Currently, AWS customers can deploy SSL certificates with just a few clicks to Elastic Load Balancers and Amazon CloudFront distributions.
Besides the click here, click there installation process, the best thing about AWS Certificate Manager is that it will also automatically handle certificate renewals for all clients, unlike Let's Encrypt, where webmasters must keep a watchful eye on the certificate's expiry date.
For the moment, AWS Certificate Manager is on a slow release cycle and is only available for the US East (Northern Virginia) region, but support for other regions will be added in the coming months.
Additionally, the company is planning to support other AWS services and add extra domain validation checks.
A simple step-by-step tutorial on how to deploy a free ACM SSL certificate is available on Amazon's blog, courtesy of Mr. Barr.
