A company hosts its applications on Amazon EC2 instances. The company must use SSL/TLS connections that encrypt data in transit to communicate…

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) is the designated AWS service for provisioning, managing, and deploying public and private SSL/TLS certificates. It is specifically designed to automate and simplify the entire certificate lifecycle, including generation, distribution, and, most importantly, automatic renewal. By integrating ACM with services like Elastic Load Balancing (which fronts EC2 instances), the company can achieve end-to-end encryption with minimal operational overhead, as ACM handles the complex and error-prone tasks of certificate management automatically.

1. AWS Certificate Manager User Guide: "AWS Certificate Manager is a service that lets you easily provision

manage

and deploy public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates... ACM handles the complexity of creating and managing public SSL/TLS certificates for your AWS-based websites and applications... and let ACM handle certificate renewals." (Source: AWS Certificate Manager User Guide

"What Is AWS Certificate Manager?"

Introduction section).

2. AWS Certificate Manager User Guide: "Managed renewal for ACM certificates - ACM manages the renewal process for the SSL/TLS certificates that you manage with ACM... ACM can automatically renew your certificate and provision it after it is issued." (Source: AWS Certificate Manager User Guide

"Features"

"Managed renewal for ACM certificates" section).

3. AWS Secrets Manager User Guide: "AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications

services

and IT resources. The service enables you to easily rotate

manage

and retrieve database credentials

API keys

and other secrets..." (Source: AWS Secrets Manager User Guide

"What is AWS Secrets Manager?"

Introduction section). This highlights its primary purpose is for secrets like keys and credentials

not certificate lifecycle management.

4. Amazon ECS Developer Guide: "Amazon ECS Service Connect provides management of service-to-service communication as an Amazon ECS configuration." (Source: Amazon ECS Developer Guide

"Service Connect"

Introduction section). This confirms its scope is specific to ECS networking.