Mastering AWS Certificate Management: ACM and AWS Private CA

Learning Objectives

After studying this guide, you should be able to:

• Provision and manage public and private SSL/TLS certificates using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM).
• Differentiate between the use cases for ACM Public Certificates and AWS Private Certificate Authority (Private CA).
• Implement certificate-based security for Application Load Balancers (ALB) and Network Load Balancers (NLB).
• Execute the process of importing third-party certificates into ACM for central management.
• Understand the automation of certificate renewal and the limitations of regional certificate deployment.

Key Terms & Glossary

• ACM (AWS Certificate Manager): A service that handles the complexity of creating, storing, and renewing public and private SSL/TLS certificates.
• AWS Private CA: A managed private CA service that helps you easily and securely manage the lifecycle of your private certificates for internal resources.
• CSR (Certificate Signing Request): A block of encoded text that is given to a Certificate Authority when applying for an SSL/TLS certificate.
• ATS (AWS Trust Service): The root CA managed by AWS that provides certificates trusted by all major browsers.
• SAN (Subject Alternative Name): An extension to TLS that allows multiple hostnames (e.g., example.com and example.net) to be protected by a single certificate.

The "Big Idea"

In modern cloud networking, confidentiality of data in transit is non-negotiable. AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) acts as the centralized trust engine for the AWS ecosystem. It removes the manual