how to configure SSL for a Tomcat web application hosted on Azure?

Question

i need to enable SSL on a tomcat web application which is hosted on Azure.

i managed to enable SSL on the standalone tomcat web app using this info: tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/ssl-howto.html

my SSL vendor has provided me with: SSL Certificate, Private Key & Intermediate SSL Certificate. CSR was generated by the vendor.

How do I configure SSL for the app while hosting on Azure?

Version info: Tomcat 7, JRE 1.6 Nature of this app: The web app has some front end pages (JSP) and interacts with various components using rest webserices. Storage: SQL Azure and Azure Blob storage Worker role being used. No Web user role. Deployment scheme described in this blog: blogs.msdn.com/b/cesardelatorre/archive/2010/09/12/developing-and-deploying-java-tomcat-apps-into-windows-azure.aspx

Answer 1

First of all setting up SSL certificate on Tomcat server is exactly same on Azure or any other Webserver running on Windows based machine. There is nothing specific to Azure and the only thing is needed it

Whenever you are going to configure SSL with Tomcat you would need to setup the Java Keystore with proper certificates so Tomcat server can read the certificate to setup the SSL tunnel between client and server.

To create a Java Keystore you would be using Keytool application which reads your certificate(any CSR,CRT,CER etc or you may need to convert depend on your need):

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/tools/solaris/keytool.html

Using Keytool you will create the Keystore and include in your Tomcat deployment. That's it.

For more info please checkout my blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/avkashchauhan/archive/2010/11/07/adding-ssl-https-security-with-tomcat-java-solution-in-windows-azure.aspx