Back in June 2015, Amazon applied to become a root Certificate Authority and since then the tech community has been scratching their heads on why, but today all of our questions have been answered with the launch of Certificate Manager (in the US, for now).
Being both a platform supplier and a security certificate vendor, Amazon Web Services is in a unique position to offer a slightly more pain-free certificate application and renewal process, making the service very appealing to application developers and web service users.
Thousands, if not millions of websites around the web rely on dozens of Amazon’s services to host and run their applications and websites, including us here at Impression. Each service, when built in a modular way, can be exposed to the word wide web to provide scalable web services, and when doing so for sensitive data, encryption becomes extremely important.
Although there are a few caveats to the certificates — that they aren’t the full Extended Validation I describe here nor can they be used on EC2 instances — the domain validation TLS offering is more than enough for companies wanting to protect their users and data more. The free price tag is also very interesting, however the certificates can only be used on Amazon services for which you pay for what you use. A prime use case for companies using AWS will be to use the certificates on CloudFront distributions.
Given SSL is now an organic search ranking factor, it makes sense for search marketers out there to consider the benefits of utilising the AWS cloud. However, now Amazon have made the move we expect Google and Microsoft to offer similar benefits to both Cloud Platform and Azure in the future.
