Certbot and Let’s Encrypt

The only way to use Amazon’s free SSL certificates is if you pipe them through something like cloudformation, use them with cloudfront or a load balancer.

Tried that for December and it turns out its fairly expensive to run an ELB for a month – it’s all fine and dandy whilst I’ve got EDU credit to burn through but I can’t afford $20 a month to shortcut an easy way to SSL cert up the site.

I started to look at certbot and lets encrypt as an automatic way of getting a cert in place, changed my apache config and here we are – running through a straight connection on port 443 to the web server.

To be fair, it was a little silly having a load balancer in front of a single web server, but I didn’t have the time to do anything else with it.

I’ve got a little bit of time now, so setting things up properly.