AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
- What it is
- Provision, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates.
- Public certificates for use with AWS services are free, and renew automatically.
- Where certificates attach
- Elastic Load Balancers, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, and other integrated services.
- ACM-issued public certificates cannot be exported for use on your own EC2 instances or on premises — use ACM Private CA for that.
- Why it matters
- Eliminates the classic outage cause: an expired certificate nobody renewed.
- Enables encryption in transit, one half of the encryption story alongside encryption at rest (AWS Key Management Service (KMS)).
- Not to be confused with
- KMS — keys for encrypting stored data. ACM — certificates for encrypting data on the wire.