ACM Certificate Automatic Renewal Failure – Fix it quickly

Stuck with ACM certificate automatic renewal failure? We can help you.

Here, at Bobcares, we assist our customers with several AWS queries as part of our AWS Support Services.

Today, let us discuss how our Support Techs fix this.

ACM Certificate Automatic Renewal Failure

Generally, ACM begins the process for managed renewal for certificates approximately 60 days before the its expiration.

It validates each domain name in the certificate. Once it validates all the associate domain names, the ACM certificate renews.

However, this process can fail for email- and DNS-validated certificates if:

1. If we import the certificate into ACM, the automatic renewal does not work.
2. Similarly, if the ACM certificate that’s being renewed is not in use it fails.

On the other hand, it can fail for email-validated certificates if:

1. It can’t establish an HTTPS connection with all the domain names in the ACM certificate.
2. The public certificate that’s returned in the response doesn’t match the certificate that ACM renews.
3. ACM was unable to find the appropriate CNAME record in the DNS database.

How to fix ACM Certificate Automatic Renewal Failure?

Moving ahead, let us see how our Support Techs fix this issue for our customers.

• Email and DNS validated certificates

We need to make sure that the ACM certificate is in use with one of the services integrated with ACM.

Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS App Runner, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Nitro Enclaves and AWS CloudFormation supports ACM certificates.

• Email validated certificates

We need to configure the AWS resources that use the ACM certificate to accept HTTPS requests from the internet.

Then we need to configure the DNS records to route requests for the domain name to the corresponding certificate attached AWS resource.

• DNS validated certificates

Initially, we update the DNS configuration to include the CNAME records by ACM.

ACM will try to establish HTTPS connections with the domain names in the certificate, up to the 45th day before the certificate expires.

ACM looks for the CNAME record in the DNS configuration for the domain names in the DNS-validated certificates.

During this process, the renewal status will be, “Pending automatic renewal.”

If the certificate is automatically validateS and does not require further action, then the renewal status changes to “Success.”

Otherwise, we can manually validate the domain using email to validate domain ownership or DNS to validate domain ownership.

Once done, the ARN of the new ACM certificate remains the same.

It automatically updates to the integrated, in-use AWS resources.

Conclusion

In short, we saw how our Support Techs fix the ACM certificate error.