An Application Load Balancer (ALB) is a type of load balancer that operates at the application layer (layer 7) of the OSI model. It can distribute incoming traffic based on the content of the request, such as the host header, path, or query parameters. An ALB can also terminate TLS connections and decrypt requests from clients before sending them to the targets.
To implement TLS for incoming traffic to the application, the following steps are required:
Create a public ALB in a public subnet and register the EC2 instances as targets in a target group.
Create two listeners for the ALB, one on port 80 for HTTP traffic and one on port 443 for HTTPS traffic.
Create a rule for the listener on port 80 to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS using the same host, path, and query parameters.
Provision a public TLS certificate in AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for the domain name of the application. ACM is a service that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates for use with AWS services and your internal connected resources.
Attach the certificate to the listener on port 443 and configure the security policy to negotiate secure connections between clients and the ALB.
Configure the security groups for the ALB and the EC2 instances to allow inbound traffic on ports 80 and 443 from the internet and outbound traffic on any port to the EC2 instances.
This solution will meet the requirements of implementing TLS for incoming traffic without impacting performance or requiring end-to-end encryption. The ALB will handle the TLS termination and decryption, while forwarding unencrypted requests to the EC2 instances.
Verified References:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/introduction.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/create-https-listener.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-overview.html
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