Create an AWS Certificate in AWS Certificate Manager

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This post is part of our series on how to Create a Multi-Tier Auto-Scaling WordPress Site on Amazon Web Services.

At the end, the overall architecture will look like the reference architecture provided by AWS for deploying WordPress.

The first step is to create a certificate for our domain in AWS Certificate Manager that will be used for our front end Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), as well as our Content Delivery Network (CDN) that we will host on CloudFront.

Login to AWS Management Console


Login to the AWS Management Console and navigate to “Certificate Manager”. Also make sure that you are in the correct region for other parts of this walk through. In our example, we will use us-east-1

Provision a new certificate in AWS Certificate Manager


Click on “Get Started” under “Provision certificates”

Then “Request” a public certificate as we will use this to front end our ELB and CDN. This certificate will be trusted by browsers so users will get a padlock when visiting your site.

Validate your Domain


Enter in your domain name. For example, for this site, we would enter in “3techies.io” and we would also enter in “*.3techies.io” so that it would cover all subdomains.

Then select DNS Validation as that is the quickest method if you have access to your DNS Records.

Add any tags that make it easy to find your certificate and then go to the the Review Page to ensure all your settings are correct.

Next, you will be provided CNAME records that add to your DNS records to validate that you own the domain.

In our case, we are using CloudFlare as our DNS Provider, so we simply add in the CNAME record with a low TTL.

After a bit of time, you’ll see that your validation is in a green “Success” status meaning that everything worked out as plan!

Certificate successfully created

Congrats, you’ve created an SSL certificate for your domain in AWS Certificate Manager. Be sure to look out for how to tie this certificate to your Load Balancer and your CDN in the future.

The next part of our series includes how to set up your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on AWS, as well as your Security Groups.

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