# How to use Amazon issued certificates?

**URL:** <https://discuss.konghq.com/t/how-to-use-amazon-issued-certificates/691>\
**Category:** Questions\
**Created:** [March 15, 2018, 10:47am UTC](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/how-to-use-amazon-issued-certificates/691 "2018-03-15T10:47:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![balexandre](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discuss.konghq.com/balexandre/32/234_2.png) [@balexandre](https://discuss.konghq.com/u/balexandre)\
**Post date:** [March 15, 2018, 10:47am UTC](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/how-to-use-amazon-issued-certificates/691/1 "2018-03-15T10:47:07Z")

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We’re in AWS and we’ve setup our certificates there as it’s free.

problem is that we can’t export it as we have no access to the private keys and the only AWS Services we can use it are:

• Elastic Load Balancing  
• Amazon CloudFront  
• Amazon API Gateway  
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk  
• AWS CloudFormation

I was wondering if it’s ok to have an Elastic Load Balancing before Kong, though it has it’s own LB …

for now, **I have no other alternative** or I will risk having this all over the place

 ![](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/uploads/konghq/original/1X/c5399642cb5835888948d2d9dfab9c0f7f7ef3e3.png)

How are you setting this up in your side?

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**Author:** ![Cooper](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discuss.konghq.com/cooper/32/9_2.png) [@Cooper](https://discuss.konghq.com/u/Cooper)\
**Post date:** [March 15, 2018, 3:56pm UTC](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/how-to-use-amazon-issued-certificates/691/2 "2018-03-15T15:56:22Z")

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Not only is putting a load balancer in front of Kong totally OK, if you are running more than one Kong node, it is essentially required!

Kong includes [a very capable load balancer](https://getkong.org/docs/latest/loadbalancing/) - which balances load across the Upstream Targets to which Kong proxies API requests.

Logically, Kong cannot balance requests that are **coming in to** Kong 🙂 - for that, you’ll want to put a load balancer in front of your Kong cluster.

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**Author:** ![balexandre](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discuss.konghq.com/balexandre/32/234_2.png) [@balexandre](https://discuss.konghq.com/u/balexandre)\
**Post date:** [March 15, 2018, 5:20pm UTC](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/how-to-use-amazon-issued-certificates/691/3 "2018-03-15T17:20:32Z")

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@Cooper

Thank you for the answer … as a newcomer to Kong, I do miss a video with the tech part in Kong: how it works, how does it handle requests, difference of adding upstreams vs api, how to join two requests in one response, can we call an api endpoint and create a new request to a second api with that payload and send just one response, etc …

99,9% of the videos out there are "kong is a good choice, has an amazing REST API for admin and this is how we use it) … that’s it ☹

I lack the technical side so we can deep understand it … Documentation is good but there are areas it’s a mess, and I think worst yet if English is not your main language. In a video things are simpler as we can see it working (demo, slides, write on board)

if you find any out there, please leave the link here 🙂