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Getting started with Amazon Certificate Manager certificates - Amazon Certificate Manager
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Getting started with Amazon Certificate Manager certificates

ACM manages public, private, and imported certificates. Certificates are used to establish secure communications across the internet or within an internal network. You can request a publicly trusted certificate directly from ACM (an "ACM certificate"), import a publicly trusted certificate issued by a third party. Self-signed certificates are also supported. To provision your organization's internal PKI, you can issue ACM certificates signed by a private certificate authority (CA) created and managed by Amazon Private CA. The CA may either reside in your account or be shared with you by a different account.

You can also automate public certificate issuance using the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol for workloads running on customer-managed infrastructure. For more information, see ACME certificate automation.

Note

To automate public certificate issuance and renewal outside integrated services such as on Amazon EC2 instances, use the ACME protocol. For more information, see ACME certificate automation. Alternatively, if you cannot use ACME, you can automate exportable certificates issued from ACM through Amazon Workload Credentials Provider.

Note

Because certificates signed by a private CA are not trusted by default, administrators must install them in client trust stores.

To begin issuing certificates, sign into the Amazon Management Console and open the ACM console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/acm/home. If the introductory page appears, choose Get Started. Otherwise, choose Certificate Manager or Private CAs in the left navigation pane.