Amazon to issue TLS certificates

Amazon Web Services has introduced its Certificate Manager service on AWS. At the same time, Microsoft has marked Amazon’s root certificates as “trusted” in an update to Windows. Amazon is now a trusted certificate authority.

Amazon makes the announcement on its own AWS blog, where it also explains how a customer can use the new service with AWS apps. This makes installing an SSL certificate on Amazon’s own platform a lot easier. It is not yet clear exactly how Amazon will promote its certificates. It is also not yet known how actively the company will market the certificates.

In mid-2015, Amazon already applied to Mozilla and the Android Open Source Project to become a certificate authority. AWC Certificate Manager or ACM certificates are verified by Amazon’s Certificate Authority and Amazon Trust Services. SSL/tls certificates used through AWS Certificate Manager are free on Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers and Amazon CloudFront.

AWS Certificate Manager is currently available in the Eastern United States, with new regions planned. Gradually, other AWS services will also be able to use ACM and, later, other domains. It is not known exactly when that will be possible and whether additional costs will be involved for services outside AWS.