AWS Custom SSL

[admin-4virtuals]

I see you guys use AWS S3 to host your dashboard files. Do you mind explaining to me how you guys use SSL? It looks like your files are coming from https://dashboard.balancedpayments.com/css/base.min-.css. Do you guys have to pay the $600 a month for the custom SSL certificate?

Thanks,
Twosick

[mjallday]

Great question @twosick

When we started the dashboard project AWS did not have the custom SSL option available so we made our own solution.

Since we already had a bunch of machines already serving content we piggybacked on them and served dashboard.balancedpayments.com from those machines. These machines simply proxy the S3 hosted file and handle the SSL cert.

The relevant section from our nginx config looks like this:

server {
    listen        443;
    server_name   dashboard.balancedpayments.com;
    ssl           on;
    ssl_certificate       /etc/nginx/balancedpayments.com.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key   /etc/nginx/balancedpayments.com.pem;

    location = / {
        proxy_pass https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/balanced-dashboard/index.html;
        expires 0;
    }

    location / {
        proxy_pass https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/balanced-dashboard/;
        expires max;
    }
}

The key here is that we upload the root index.html file with no caching/expiration data so every time you request the dashboard you get that page and it points to hashed versions of the actual application with heavy caching so you still get reasonable performance from it.

This is a neat trick so we only end up paying for the cost of running the instances rather than the $600 SSL cert option that you mentioned. The downside is that it's more likely that our machines will go down than AWS's S3 but in that case we have bigger problems since the dashboard consumes our API anyway.

Let us know if you want any more info on this setup.

[admin-4virtuals]

Yes that is what I thought you guys probably did. I took some tips from your grunt config file and applied them to my own projects(like the no cache on index.html). I approached it just about the same way.

I use the AWS ELB to terminate the SSL then have my content servers proxy the index.html from Cloudfront/S3. Oh and I also use Ember too. It's makes your life alot simpler :).

Thanks for the faster response than from some other company I know(Stripe...).