How can I use https with AWS Cloudfront without paying $600 to upload my cert?

Question

I can host a dynamic website through Amazon CloudFront because they have CNAME Wildcard Support. However, some pages of my Site use HTTPS. Amazon have some documentation about how to associate your SSL certificate with a CloudFront distribution but the pricing shows that it costs $600 per month, too much for me.

My question is... is it possible to configure CloudFront so HTTP requests are served from CloudFront but HTTPS requests are ignored by CloudFront and passed directly to the origin (in my case, a Elastic Load Balancer which can decrypt SSL at no extra cost)?

Solution 1

As of March 2014, Amazon CloudFront supports SNI, at no additional cost, see details here.

This will allow you to use your ssl certificate on CloudFront, without paying $600 monthly.

Please note that SNI is not supported by (extremely) old browsers (pre-IE7, pre-Chrome6, pre-FF 2), see details in link above.

Solution 2

[Note: This answer was correct up until March 2014]

No, this is not possible with CloudFront. The user will hit the mismatched certificate before CloudFront processes the request because of the natures of DNS and SSL. You might consider CloudFlare's SSL offering.

Solution 3

Not to my knowledge - Cloudfront are still charging $600/m, however there are services out there that offer cheaper SSL integration.

At CDNify (where I work), we've just made the decision to offer this for free.

Comments

[ceejayoz]

You might want to consider disclaiming that you work for CDNify. If your primary purpose here is to tout your services, please don't. cdnify.com/blog/jamie-community-manager

[Jamie]

Sorry if I wasn't clear - I've edited my comment.