Deploy a global Google-managed certificate with load balancer authorization

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This tutorial shows you how to use Certificate Manager to deploy a global Google-managed certificate with load balancer authorization.

Load balancer authorization is the most efficient method for obtaining a Google-managed certificate. It keeps your DNS configuration clean and provisions the TLS certificate after your configuration is complete.

The following load balancers support Google-managed certificates with load balancer authorization:

• Global external Application Load Balancer
• Classic Application Load Balancer
• Global external proxy Network Load Balancer

Objectives

This tutorial shows you how to complete the following tasks:

• Create a Google-managed certificate issued by a publicly trusted Certificate Authority (CA) with load balancer authorization by using Certificate Manager.
• Deploy the certificate to a supported load balancer by using a target HTTPS proxy.

If you're deploying a certificate to a production domain, traffic is interrupted briefly while the certificate is set up and activated on your load balancer.

Before you begin

1. Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

2. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

3. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

4. Enable the Compute Engine, Certificate Manager APIs.

   Enable the APIs

5. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

6. To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

   gcloud init

   Note: If you installed the gcloud CLI previously, make sure you have the latest version by running gcloud components update.

7. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

8. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

9. Enable the Compute Engine, Certificate Manager APIs.

   Enable the APIs

10. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

11. To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

    gcloud init

    Note: If you installed the gcloud CLI previously, make sure you have the latest version by running gcloud components update.

Required roles

Make sure that you have the following roles to complete the tasks in this tutorial:

• Certificate Manager Owner (roles/certificatemanager.owner): Required to create and manage Certificate Manager resources.
• Compute Load Balancer Admin (roles/compute.loadBalancerAdmin) or Compute Network Admin (roles/compute.networkAdmin): Required to create and manage HTTPS target proxy.

• DNS Administrator (roles/dns.admin): Required if you want to use Cloud DNS as your DNS solution.

For more information, see the following:

• Roles and permissions for Certificate Manager.
• Compute Engine IAM roles and permissions for Compute Engine.

• Roles and permissions for Cloud DNS.

Note: If you aren't assigned the permissions or roles, request the missing roles from the Identity and Access Management (IAM) administrator who has the Project IAM Admin role (roles/resourcemanager.projectIamAdmin).

Domain names

To create certificates, get the fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) of the domains you own. If you don't have a domain, you can use Cloud Domains to register a domain.

Create the load balancer

This tutorial assumes that you've already created and configured the load balancer's backends, health checks, backend services, and URL maps. If you've created an external Application Load Balancer, note the name of the URL map because you need it later in this tutorial.

If you haven't created the load balancer, see the following pages to create one:

• To create a global external Application Load Balancer, see Set up a global external Application Load Balancer with VM instance group backends.

• To create a classic Application Load Balancer, see Set up a classic Application Load Balancer with a managed instance group backend.

• To create a Global external proxy Network Load Balancer (SSL proxy), see Set up a global external proxy Network Load Balancer (SSL proxy) with VM instance group backends.

• To create a Classic proxy Network Load Balancer (SSL proxy), see Set up a classic proxy Network Load Balancer (SSL proxy) with VM instance group backends.

Create a Google-managed certificate with load balancer authorization

To create a Google-managed certificate with load balancer authorization, do the following:

Console

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Certificate Manager page.

   Go to Certificate Manager

2. On the Certificates tab, click Add Certificate.

3. In the Certificate name field, enter a unique name for the certificate.

4. Optional: In the Description field, enter a description for the certificate. The description lets you identify the certificate.

5. For Location, select Global.

6. For Scope, select Default.

7. For Certificate type, select Create Google-managed certificate.

8. For Certificate Authority type, select Public.

9. In the Domain Names field, specify a comma-delimited list of domain names of the certificate. Each domain name must be a fully qualified domain name, such as myorg.example.com.

10. For Authorization type, select Load balancer authorization.

11. In the Labels field, specify labels to associate with the certificate. To add a label, click Add label, and specify a key and a value for your label.

12. Click Create.

    The new certificate appears in the list of certificates.

gcloud

To create a global Google-managed certificate with load balancer authorization, use the certificate-manager certificates create command:

gcloud certificate-manager certificates create CERTIFICATE_NAME \
    --domains="DOMAIN_NAMES"

Replace the following:

• CERTIFICATE_NAME: the name of the certificate.
• DOMAIN_NAMES: a comma-delimited list of the target domains. Each domain name must be a fully qualified domain name, such as myorg.example.com.

Terraform

Use a google_certificate_manager_certificate resource.

resource "google_certificate_manager_certificate" "default" {
  name        = "${local.name}-rootcert-${random_id.tf_prefix.hex}"
  description = "Cert with LB authorization"
  managed {
    domains = [local.domain]
  }
  labels = {
    "terraform" : true
  }
}

To learn how to apply or remove a Terraform configuration, see Basic Terraform commands.

API

Create the certificate by making a POST request to the certificates.create method as follows:

POST /v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/certificates?certificate_id=CERTIFICATE_NAME"
{
 "managed": {
  "domains": ["DOMAIN_NAME"],
 }
}

Replace the following:

• PROJECT_ID: the ID of the Google Cloud project.
• CERTIFICATE_NAME: the name of the certificate.
• DOMAIN_NAMES: a comma-delimited list of the target domains. Each domain name must be a fully qualified domain name, such as myorg.example.com.

Deploy the certificate to a load balancer

To deploy the global Google-managed certificate, use a certificate map.

Create a certificate map

Create a certificate map that references the certificate map entry associated with your certificate:

gcloud

To create a certificate map, use the gcloud certificate-manager maps create command:

gcloud certificate-manager maps create CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME

Replace CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME with the name of the target certificate map.

Terraform

To create a certificate map, you can use a google_certificate_manager_certificate_map resource.

resource "google_certificate_manager_certificate_map" "certificate_map" {
  name        = "${local.name}-certmap-${random_id.tf_prefix.hex}"
  description = "${local.domain} certificate map"
  labels = {
    "terraform" : true
  }
}

Create a certificate map entry

Create a certificate map entry and associate it with your certificate and certificate map:

gcloud

To create a certificate map entry, use the gcloud certificate-manager maps entries create command:

gcloud certificate-manager maps entries create CERTIFICATE_MAP_ENTRY_NAME \
    --map="CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME" \
    --certificates="CERTIFICATE_NAME" \
    --hostname="HOSTNAME"

Replace the following:

• CERTIFICATE_MAP_ENTRY_NAME: the name of the certificate map entry.
• CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME: the name of the certificate map to which the certificate map entry is attached.
• CERTIFICATE_NAME: the name of the certificate you want to associate with the certificate map entry.

• HOSTNAME: the hostname that you want to associate with the certificate map entry.

  If you are creating certificates with a wildcard domain, specify the hostname with a wildcard too, such as *.example.com.

Terraform

To create a certificate map entry, you can use a google_certificate_manager_certificate_map_entry resource.

resource "google_certificate_manager_certificate_map_entry" "first_entry" {
  name        = "${local.name}-first-entry-${random_id.tf_prefix.hex}"
  description = "example certificate map entry"
  map         = google_certificate_manager_certificate_map.certificate_map.name
  labels = {
    "terraform" : true
  }
  certificates = [google_certificate_manager_certificate.root_cert.id]
  hostname     = local.domain
}

Verify that the certificate map entry is active

Verify that the certificate map entry is active before attaching its corresponding certificate map to the target proxy.

To verify the certificate map entry, use the gcloud certificate-manager maps entries describe command:

gcloud certificate-manager maps entries describe CERTIFICATE_MAP_ENTRY_NAME \
    --map="CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME"

Replace the following:

• CERTIFICATE_MAP_ENTRY_NAME: the name of the certificate map entry.
• CERTIFICATE_NAME: the name of the certificate you want to associate with the certificate map entry.

The output is similar to the following:

certificates:
createTime: '2021-09-06T10:01:56.229472109Z'
hostname: example.com
name: projects/my-project/locations/global/certificateMaps/myCertMap/certificateMapEntries/myCertMapEntry
state: ACTIVE
updateTime: '2021-09-06T10:01:58.277031787Z'

Attach the certificate map to the target proxy

You can attach the certificate map to a new target proxy or an existing target proxy.

gcloud

To attach the certificate map to a new target proxy, use the gcloud compute target-https-proxies create command:

gcloud compute target-https-proxies create PROXY_NAME \
    --certificate-map="CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME" \
    --url-map="URL_MAP" \
    --global

Replace the following:

• PROXY_NAME: the name of the target proxy.
• CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME: the name of the certificate map referencing the certificate map entry and the associated certificate.
• URL_MAP: the name of the URL map

To attach the certificate map to an existing target HTTPS proxy, use the gcloud compute target-https-proxies update command. If you don't know the name of the existing target proxy, go to the Target proxies page and note the name of the target proxy.

gcloud compute target-https-proxies update PROXY_NAME \
    --certificate-map="CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME" \
    --global

After creating or updating the target proxy, run the following command to verify it:

gcloud compute target-https-proxies list

Terraform

To attach the certificate map to the target proxy, you can use a google_compute_target_https_proxy resource.

When configuring a target proxy, if you attach TLS (SSL) certificates directly and also through a certificate map, the proxy uses the certificates referenced by the certificate map and ignores the directly attached TLS (SSL) certificates.

Verify the status of the certificate

Before deploying a certificate to a load balancer, verify that it's active. It can take several minutes for the certificate state to change to ACTIVE.

Console

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Certificate Manager page.

   Go to Certificate Manager

2. On the Certificates tab, check the Status column for the certificate.

gcloud

To verify the status of the certificate, run the following command:

gcloud certificate-manager certificates describe CERTIFICATE_NAME

Replace CERTIFICATE_NAME with the name of the target Google-managed certificate.

The output is similar to the following:

createTime: '2021-10-20T12:19:53.370778666Z'
expireTime: '2022-05-07T05:03:49Z'
managed:
  authorizationAttemptInfo:
  - domain: myorg.example.com
    state: AUTHORIZED
  domains:
  - myorg.example.com
  state: ACTIVE
name: projects/myProject/locations/global/certificates/myCert
pemCertificate: |
  -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
  [...]
  -----END CERTIFICATE-----
sanDnsnames:
  - myorg.example.com
updateTime: '2021-10-20T12:19:55.083385630Z'

If the certificate state is not ACTIVE after several hours, check the following:

• The certificate map referencing the certificate is attached to the correct target proxy.
• The target proxy is attached to the correct load balancer.
• The target domain's DNS configuration points to the target load balancer's IP address.

For more troubleshooting steps, see Troubleshoot Certificate Manager.

Clean up

To avoid incurring charges to your Google Cloud account for the resources used in this tutorial, delete them.

1. Delete the load balancer and its resources.

   For more information, see Clean up a load balancing setup.

2. Delete or detach the certificate map from the proxy.

   To delete the certificate map, run the following command:

   gcloud compute target-https-proxies delete PROXY_NAME
   

   If you want to keep the target HTTPS proxy, then detach the certificate map from the proxy. Before you detach the certificate map, note the following:

   • If there are any TLS (SSL) certificates attached directly to the proxy, detaching the certificate map causes the proxy to resume using those directly attached TLS (SSL) certificates.
   • If there are no TLS (SSL) certificates attached directly to the proxy, the certificate map can't be detached from the proxy. You must first attach at least one TLS (SSL) certificate directly to the proxy before you can detach the certificate map.

   To detach the certificate map, run the following command:

   gcloud compute target-https-proxies update PROXY_NAME \
       --clear-certificate-map
   

   Replace PROXY_NAME with the name of the target proxy.

3. Delete the certificate map entry from the certificate map:

   gcloud certificate-manager maps entries delete CERTIFICATE_MAP_ENTRY_NAME \
       --map="CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME"
   

   Replace the following:

   • CERTIFICATE_MAP_ENTRY_NAME: the name of the certificate map entry.
   • CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME: the name of the certificate map.

4. Delete the certificate map:

   gcloud certificate-manager maps delete CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME
   

   Replace CERTIFICATE_MAP_NAME with the name of the certificate map.

5. Delete the Google-managed certificate:

   Console

   1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Certificate Manager page.

      Go to Certificate Manager

   2. On the Certificates tab, select the checkbox of the certificate.

   3. Click Delete.

   4. In the dialog that appears, click Delete to confirm.

   gcloud

   gcloud certificate-manager certificates delete CERTIFICATE_NAME
   

   Replace CERTIFICATE_NAME with the name of the target certificate.

What's next

• Manage certificates
• Manage certificate maps
• Manage certificate map entries