There are AWS questions that I don't know the answer to - and sometimes these questions need answers. About a week ago, the following question was posed: How does an Amazon Web Services ELB function when the backend instances utilize a self-signed certificate? I was lucky enough to have the time to investigate. If you are just looking for the answer, see "short answer" below. For instructions (and a CloudFormation file) to allow you to duplicate my work, see"long answer" further below.

Short answer:

Yes. The AWS ELB will work with backend instances that utilize a self-signed certificate.

Long answer:

if you'd like to duplicate the test I utilized a CloudFormation file that builds this very infrastructure (an ELB, an Auto Scaling Group and Ubuntu instances running Apache accepting HTTPS connections on port 443) you can get this file from my "Snippets" repository at https://github.com/colinbjohnson/snippets/tree/master/aws/elb/elb_backend_selfsigned_cert A diagram describing the configuration is below: