Can't connect to Express server over HTTPS hosted on Amazon EC2 through Cloudfront

Hi, thanks for posting your question on re:Post!

Your CloudFront config looks good - you have correctly selected "Match viewer" for the Origin Protocol Policy. Could you provide more details about your use case? This information will help us offer the most relevant and effective advice.

EC2 instances indeed come with Public DNS names that allow access to your instances via the internet. However, it's important to note that these Public DNS names are not designed to be stable over time. They can change when instances are stopped and started, or when there are changes to the underlying infrastructure. This can potentially lead to disruptions if you rely on the Public DNS names for your application's accessibility.

To achieve a more stable and reliable solution for handling traffic to your instances, we recommend utilising an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). An ELB provides a single endpoint that distributes incoming traffic across multiple instances, increasing the availability and fault tolerance of your application.

Here's a concise guide on the recommended approach:

1. Implement an ELB to manage traffic across your instances, ensuring better fault tolerance and availability.
2. Utilise Route 53 to create an Alias Record that points to your ELB.
3. Create an SSL/TLS certificate for your ELB through AWS Certificate Manager for your custom domain managed with Route 53.
4. Use ELB as an origin for Amazon CloudFront. This way, you can also offload the SSL/TLS functionality from your application server.

Optionally, please follow our guide on Adding HTTPS listeners to Elastic Load Balancers.

This is an example of an express app that is listening on both port 80 and 443 (and is supporting HTTP and HTTPS):

const fs = require('fs');
const http = require('http');
const https = require('https');
const credentials = {
  key: fs.readFileSync('key.pem', 'utf8'),
  cert: fs.readFileSync('cert.pem', 'utf8')
};

const express = require('express');
const app = express();

const httpServer = http.createServer(app);
const httpsServer = https.createServer(credentials, app);

httpServer.listen(80);
httpsServer.listen(443);

In your Node application, please make sure that you are calling createServer twice (once with app and once with credentials and app).