Certificate Manager overview

Certificate Manager simplifies the acquisition, deployment, and management of Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates. Certificate Manager supports deployment of global and regional certificates on Google Cloud load balancers, regional certificates on Secure Web Proxy proxies, and global certificates on Media CDN.

Supported load balancers

Google Cloud load balancers that refer to a target HTTPS proxy or a target SSL proxy (TargetSslProxy) use TLS certificates to encrypt information sent over the network.

To use Certificate Manager, your load balancer must be compatible with the corresponding Network Service Tier. For a comprehensive breakdown of load balancer types and their respective network service tier support, see Summary of Google Cloud load balancers.

Certificate Manager supports the following load balancer resources:

Target HTTPS proxies used by Application Load Balancers Target SSL proxies used by proxy Network Load Balancers
  • Global external Application Load Balancer
  • Classic Application Load Balancer
  • Regional external Application Load Balancer
  • Regional internal Application Load Balancer
  • Cross-region internal Application Load Balancer
  • Global external proxy Network Load Balancer
  • Classic proxy Network Load Balancer

For more information about the differences between target HTTPS and target SSL proxy types, see Target proxies.

Supported TLS certificates

Certificate Manager supports the following types of TLS certificates:

  • Google-managed certificates: certificates that Google Cloud obtains and manages for you. Using Certificate Manager, you can automatically issue and renew Google-managed certificates. If you want to use your own trust chain rather than rely on public certificate authorities (CAs) to issue your certificates, you can configure Certificate Manager to use a CA pool from the Certificate Authority Service as the certificate issuer instead.

  • Self-managed certificates: certificates that you obtain, provision, and renew yourself. You manually upload the certificates to Certificate Manager and manage them. You can use certificates issued by third-party CAs, or CAs you trust, or your own self-signed certificates.

For more information about the supported certificates, see Certificates.

Benefits

Certificate Manager offers the following benefits:

Automation

  • Automatically issue, renew, and manage Google-managed certificates.
  • Provision Google-managed certificates in advance to enable seamless, zero-downtime migrations to Google Cloud.

Security

  • Securely store and deploy millions of certificates.
  • Secure your configurations with Google-managed certificates, eliminating the need to manage certificate private keys.
  • Implement mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication on your load balancer for enhanced security. For more information, see Mutual TLS overview in the Cloud Load Balancing documentation.

Flexibility

  • Verify ownership of domains using either DNS-based or load balancer-based authorization methods.
  • Choose between Google-managed certificates (automatically handled by Google) or self-managed certificates (obtained and managed independently).
  • Use the ACME protocol to get publicly trusted certificates for endpoints you manage from the Public Certificate Authority. For more information, see Public CA.
  • Manage all certificates in a unified manner using the Google Cloud console, Google Cloud CLI, or the Certificate Manager API.
  • Control certificate assignment and selection based on domain names. This lets you manage and serve larger numbers of certificates than with Compute Engine SSL certificates.
  • Control the assignment and selection of certificates based on hostnames at a granular level.

Limitations

Certificate Manager has the following limitations:

  • Certificate Manager only supports the Public Certificate Authority and the Let's Encrypt CA for issuing publicly trusted Google-managed certificates.
  • Certificate Manager only supports Certificate Authority Service for issuing privately trusted Google-managed certificates.
  • The number of domains allowed in the Subject Alternative Names (SANs) field for Google-managed certificates is limited to a maximum of 100 when using DNS authorization and to a maximum of five when using load balancer authorization.
  • Google-managed certificates have limitations on the length of supported domain names. For more information, see Domain name length limitations for Google-managed certificates.
  • Certificates with the ALL_REGIONS scope don't support load balancer authorization.

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