I have an Express app running on AWS EB which I want to secure with SSL. From what I understand I can either set this up at the application level using the https module or at the EB environment level by applying the certificate to the load balancer.
I have done the second of these two options and have it working but I'm unsure on the best practice. Should I be doing it at the express application level or via the EB Load balancer or should I be doing both?
Adding SSL certificate at the ELB level is the right choice which I believe should be sufficient.
The advantage is when you have SSL Certificates at ELB level, offloading happens at multiple servers managed by Amazon used for ELBs, reducing the computational demand from your web server. Also the configuration is lean & transparent.
Note: For added security you can place the web servers in private subnets while keeping ELB public.
Related
I have deployed a Python Flask based app in AWS. It is running fine on http://<ip>. I need to convert this to https. I have sent request for admin to enable port 443 for https.
Will that automatically make my app to https or do I need to install or setup something else to make it happen?
You have multiple choices for this;
Use ACM (Easiest?!):
if you're using AWS loadbalancers, you can create a certificate using ACM service and assign it to your loadbalancer and modify your Target Groups in EC2 panel.
If you are using cloudfront, you can also configure your SSL/TLS there. (Not changing the loadbalancer and target groups). It will work as an upper layer.
Use other certificate providers excluding AWS ACM:
You can setup something like Lets Encrypt or use Cloudflare services.
Note: it really depends on how your cloud stack currently is, you maybe be only deploying on EC2 Server and having Nginx configured and having everything else done outside of AWS with other services or you can have Lets Encrypt certificate on your ALB.
This post just gives you some keywords, you can search and see exact instruction/tutorial for every solutions.
I have created a NodeJS application using http/2 following this example:
Note: this application uses self-signed certificate until now.
We deployed it on GKE, and it is working until now.
Here is how this simple architecture looks like:
Now, we want to start using real certificate, and don`t know where is the right place to put it.
Should we put it in pod (overriding self-signed certificate)?
Should we add a proxy on the top of this architecture to put the certificate in?
In GKE you can use a ingress object to routing external HTTP(S) traffic to your applications in your cluster. With this you have 3 options:
Google-managed certificates
Self-managed certificates shared with GCP
Self-managed certificates as Secret resources
Check this guide for the ingress load balancing
The Client's SSL session terminates at the LB level, the self-signed certificates being used are just to encrypt communication between the LB and the Pods. So if you want the client to use your new valid certificate it needs to be at the LB level.
On a side note, having your application servers communicate with the LoadBalancer over HTTP will give you a performance boost. Since the LB is acting as a reverse proxy anyway.
You can read this article about LoadBalancing it's written by the author of HAProxy
I hava a Nodejs/Express application running on AWS. My public URL (www.example.com) is registered in a host provider (SiteGround).
My host provider DNS entry for the application points to AWS (application.example.com points to my AWS public IP).
My host provider has also our company web site running WordPress.
So, if you point to our public URL you get our website. Pointing to the application you get our SaaS login page.
All of that runs fine with HTTP. I have now a task to migrate everything to HTTPS. I've checked how to add HTTPS to nodejs, all fine.
My question is related to certificates. Questions:
a) Should I get the SSL certificate on my host company or on AWS? Both offers the certificates.
b) Do I need a certificate on AWS (to be added to nodejs) and at my domain (to allow HTTPS domain access) or just in nodejs ?
It does not matter from where you get your certificate as long as your provider gives you an authorized certificate. However, if you use Amazon's certificate manager, it can be be easier to integrate with their services.
If you are serving your application through AWS load balancer then you don't need to add it to the Node.js application, instead you get a certificate through the certificate manager and add it to the listening interface in the load balancer, it gets served automatically this way.
Create a Classic Load Balancer with an HTTPS Listener
HTTPS Listeners for Your Application Load Balancer
If you are serving your application directly, then you will need to add it to the Node.js application (e.g. using https module).
I'll try to answer each question below:
a) Should I get the SSL certificate on my host company or on AWS? Both
offers the certificates.
If the Amazon issued certificate is strong enough for your needs, like basic https encryption, I would opt to use them for the sake of simplicity. You just need to fill the form, validate and Amazon is in charge of making it secure and renew it automatically when it expires.
b) Do I need a certificate on AWS (to be added to nodejs) and at my
domain (to allow HTTPS domain access) or just in nodejs ?
AWS issued certificates can only be used with AWS managed services such as Application Load Balancer and CloudFront - CDN. There are many docs explaining about how to setup an ELB with AWS Certificate and EC2 Backend, check Create a Classic Load Balancer with an HTTPS Listener
In order to use them inside your EC2 vm you would need to download and configure it in your webserver. I think AWS will never allow it to avoid security breaches.
It doesn't matter how you will get a certificate. You can request free certificates with Letsencrypt using API, you can create certificates in AWS Load Balancer (but don't forget to check if AWS certificate limitations are fine for your case)
AWS LoadBalancer will be in front of your EC2 so it will sign certificates for you.
If you have an option to get certificate files (e.g. you create certificates yourself by using letsencrypt or other cert provider), you should keep certificates on your EC2 instance (if you have multiple instances, you should keep certificates on each instance). And you should use Network Load Balancer on tcp level, so NLB will just proxy your traffic which was already signed correctly.
Also you can use existing third-party solutions from AWS marketplace or non-AWS solutions. E.g. you can use AWS Kilo SLL. It is easy to setup, it will create and renew certificates for your domains. So you will have just an extra EC2 isntance which will sign all your traffic depending on the request domain. Mostly sure there are other alternatives similar solution to use, for our 240 domains Kilo works fine
I have 2 clusters running 2 services and several nodejs instances.
I want to have a reverse proxy in front of my clusters and i have been facing many problems/questions:
do i have to manually update the SSL certificate on every instance everytime it expires?
should the SSL encryption be used only outside the reverse proxy?
do i have to deploy an nginx cluster or is there an AWS service for this?
where can i find documentation for this?
If the answer is too big a reference to some documentation would suffice.
You have two options available
AWS CloudFront
AWS Application ELB
Using either one you can terminate tge SSL externally to the EC2 and also use AWS issued free SSL certificates.
I have AWS instances (behind a load balancer) serving a Node.js / Express app for mobile clients. I would like to enable SSL for the API calls on this app. There are multiple tutorials on how to enhance my Express app to use SSL, but can can folks advise please what should be the ELB configuration in such a scenario?
Should I have the ELB listeners (both load-balancer side as well as instance-side) to be http (not https)? And then make the Node.js app use a certificate from say LetsEncrypt?
Or should I instead have the load balancer be https based (and thus have its own associated certificate from AWS Certificate Manager)? In that case, what happens to the LetsEncrypt certificate - do I still integrate that with the Node.js app?
Many thanks!
You would enable SSL on the load balancer and use an ACM certificate. You wouldn't need a SSL certificate on the NodeJS server unless you just want the communication between the ELB and the server to also be encrypted.