Running nginx with SSL on AWS

Solution 1:

ACM certificates can only be used by AWS managed services, primarily load balancers. You can't access the private key so you can't present an ACM cert using Nginx installed on your EC2 instance.

Your best options are:

  • Terminate https at an ALB, forward traffic over http to the web server
  • Use a Let's Encrypt certificate. There's a wide range of software to choose from that helps automate this.