Best Practices in AWS Certificate Manager with Jonathan Kozolchyk

Jonathan (Koz) Kozolchyk, General Manager for Certificate Services at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the best practices he recommends around certificates. Jonathan walks through when and why he recommends private certs, and the use cases where he’d recommend longer or unusual expirations. Jonathan also highlights the importance of knowing who’s using what cert and why he believes in separating expiration from rotation. Corey and Jonathan also discuss their love of smart home devices as well as their security concerns around them and how they hope these concerns are addressed moving forward. 
About JonathanJonathan is General Manager of Certificate Services for AWS, leading the engineering, operations, and product management of AWS certificate offerings including AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) AWS Private CA, Code Signing, and Encryption in transit. Jonathan is an experienced leader of software organizations, with a focus on high availability distributed systems and PKI. Starting as an intern, he has built his career at Amazon, and has led development teams within our Consumer and AWS businesses, spanning from Fulfillment Center Software, Identity Services, Customer Protection Systems and Cryptography. Jonathan is passionate about building high performing teams, and working together to create solutions for our customers. He holds a BS in Computer Science from University of Illinois, and multiple patents for his work inventing for customers. When not at work you’ll find him with his wife and two kids or playing with hobbies that are hard to do well with limited upside, like roasting coffee.

Links Referenced: AWS website: https://www.aws.com Email: mailto:koz@amazon.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/seakoz


Transcript
Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: In the cloud, ideas turn into innovation at virtually limitless speed and scale. To secure innovation in the cloud, you need Runtime Insights to prioritize critical risks and stay ahead of unknown threats. What's Runtime Insights, you ask? Visit sysdig.com/screaming to learn more. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G.com/screaming.
My thanks as well to Sysdig for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. As I record this, we are about a week and a half from re:Inforce in Anaheim, California. I am not attending, not out of any moral reason not to because I don’t believe in cloud security or conferences that Amazon has that are named after subject lines, but rather because I am going to be officiating a wedding on the other side of the world because I am an ordained minister of the Church of There Is A Problem With This Website’s Security Certificate. So today, my guest is going to be someone who’s a contributor, in many ways, to that religion, Jonathan Kozolchyk—but, you know, we all call him Koz—is the general manager for Certificate Services at AWS. Koz, thank you for joining me.

Koz: Happy to be here, Corey.

Corey: So, one of the nice things about ACM historically—the managed service that handles certificates from AWS—is that for anything public-facing, it’s free—which is always nice, you should not be doing upcharges for security—but you also don’t let people have the private portion of the cert. You control