Automate SSL on EC2 with AWS Certificate Manager’s New ACME Support

CloudOpsBlog.com

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Aug 5, 2026

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For years, whenever I hosted an application on an EC2 instance, my go-to solution for HTTPS was Let’s Encrypt + Certbot. It worked well, but I still had to rely on an external Certificate Authority and manage everything from the server itself.

Recently, AWS announced ACME support for AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and I wanted to see how it worked in a real-world setup.

In this article, we’ll deploy an SSL certificate for an Nginx web server running on EC2 using AWS ACM’s new ACME capability. If you’re already familiar with Certbot, you’ll notice that the workflow is very similar — the main difference is that AWS Certificate Manager now becomes your ACME server.

Let’s get started.

What We’re Building

We’ll secure an Nginx application running on an EC2 instance using a certificate issued through AWS Certificate Manager.

Our setup looks like this:

Internet
                    |
          https://app.example.com
                    |
              EC2 Instance
              Ubuntu + Nginx
                    |
          Certbot (ACME Client)
                    |
        AWS Certificate Manager
             ACME Endpoint
                    |
        Amazon Trust…