AWS instance change to https

Question

We now use AWS to set up our website, we're recently trying to set up a page that will allow our customers to send emails to us. We set up an EC2 instance to work as an email server, but it runs on HTTP. Since our website works on HTTPS, ajax can't send HTTP messages and we have to make the EC2 instance run on HTTPS, but I don't know how to do that.

$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: "https://ec2-*-*-*-*.*.compute.amazonaws.com/send",
    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
    beforeSend: function(request) {
        request.setRequestHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");
        request.setRequestHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Method", "POST");
    },
    async: true,
    data: JSON.stringify({
        "name": name,
        "email": email,
        "message": message
    }),
    traditional: true,
    error: function(xhr, status, error) {
        var errorMessage = xhr.status + ': ' + xhr.statusText
        alert('Error - ' + errorMessage);
    },
    success: function(result) {
        alert(" Good link");
    }
});

Answer 1

There are generally three ways which you can use to setup SSL for your instance.

1. Setup a load balancer (LB) in front of your EC2. For this you need your own custom domain. Having the domain, you can get free public SSL certificate from AWS ACM and deploy it easliy on the LB. With the LB, your app will connect to the LB using HTTPS. The the LB will forward the traffic to the instance as HTTP within the AWS internal.network.

2. Manually setup a valid, public SSL certificate on your instance. For that AWS ACM can't be used as in step 1, thus you need to get the SSL cert from a third party (not AWS). A popular choice is https://letsencrypt.org/ with https://certbot.eff.org/ . Installation of the SSL on the instance would usually require setting up a reverse proxy, such as nginx. By the way, StackOverflow is using letsencyrpt for its own SSL cert.

3. Setup a CloudFront (CF) distribution in-front of your EC2 instance. You can use custom domain with ACM SSL certificate on the CF distro, or you can use default CF endpoint which is also HTTPs. However, the issue here is that the traffic between CF and your instance will be HTTP across inte.net which is a security risk . To fix that you either have to setup valid SSL cert for HTTPs using step 1 or 2.