Enabling HTTPS on Elastic Beanstalk without a load balancer
- Aug 6, 2018
The recommended way to enable HTTPS in Elastic Beanstalk is to use one of AWS’s load balancers such as the Application Load Balancer (ALB) which supports autoscaling, fault tolerance, and other things.
This blog is about hosting a web app prototype on a single EC2 instance, using HTTPS via Let’s Encrypt, without a load balancer.
Using an AWS ALB costs a minimum of about $18 per month, on top of any other charges you currently have, such as $5 for the t2.micro instance that you may be running your prototype on.
So, if you’ve only got one EC2 instance in Elastic Beanstalk for your prototype, and don’t currently want the benefits of an ALB (fault tolerance, auto-scaling, etc), but do want the benefits of HTTPS (protection from interception, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, etc), read on.