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I currently have my NextJS site and my domain hosted with Vercel, which provides a SSL certificate for my domains.

My web application is on mydomain.com and my backend domain is backend.mydomain.com

Since my backend is in EC2, I tried to set up a AWS Load Balancer to make HTTPS requests from my frontend to backend.

Should I set up a HTTP/HTTPS load balancer, or a TCP load balancer? AWS keeps asking for my certificate, but I do not have it, since the details are hidden from my by Vercel.

Will I have to contact them to get more details?

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  • I'm confused. What / where is your front end - is this a static single page or hosted somewhere? How does the Vercel SSL cert come into this? Typically you would just create a certificate with AWS Certificate Manager, associate it with an ALB, and point the ALB at your EC2 instances.
    – Tim
    Oct 8, 2020 at 18:58
  • The frontend is a NextJS application hosted by Vercel. I thought the Vercel SSL would be related because the backend.mydomain should have a Vercel cert already and I wouldn't need to use one for the ALB.... right?
    – Jon Tan
    Oct 8, 2020 at 19:12
  • Ok. The front end hosting and back end hosting are completely independent.
    – Tim
    Oct 8, 2020 at 21:38

2 Answers 2

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From what you've said your front end is hosted by Vercel, your back end by EC2. They're completely independent from a load balancing / certificate point of view.

I suggest:

  • Create a certificate for your back end server using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). Alternately you can import an existing SSL cert into ACM, but then it won't re-issue automatically.
  • Create an AWS Application Load Balancer, and associate it with the new ACM cert
  • Ensure your load balancer directs traffic to your EC2 instance. You can use auto scaling or do it manually, your call.

In comments you mentioned you can't use ACM because you already have a cert issued elsewhere. You can have multiple CAs issue a certificate for the same domain. If you're having a problem with certificate issuing please create another question that's much more detailed.

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  • I see what you mean. However, I am unable to create the certificate with ACM because backend.mydomain.com already has a certificate created by Vercel already. The request fails with a "CAA Error"
    – Jon Tan
    Oct 8, 2020 at 22:20
  • My frontend is hosted by Vercel and my backend is by EC2. However, the backend.mydomain.com is managed by Vercel and that's been throwing me in a loop since I don't know where I am supposed to reuse my Vercel Certificate or not
    – Jon Tan
    Oct 8, 2020 at 22:27
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    You should be able to issue a cert from ACM even if another place has issued a cert. It's not like having a cert done blocks another being done. If your core problem is issuing the certificate suggest you ask a new question and give a lot more technical detail including environment and details of the error message. You can also import an external certificate into ACM, answer updated in a minute.
    – Tim
    Oct 8, 2020 at 23:59
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  1. You need to host your site on Ec2
  2. You need to add your SSL certificate to your site.
  3. Then use HTTP/HTTPS Load balancer.
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  • I don't think that's right. Hosting on Vercel shouldn't be the issue. I think the way to proceed is to create a certificate for ALB but I'm not sure what to fill it when it asks for my domain
    – Jon Tan
    Oct 8, 2020 at 20:50
  • That's an imprecise answer which I'm not sure is correct.
    – Tim
    Oct 8, 2020 at 21:38

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