Serving Metabase over HTTPS

In Chapter 2, Hosting Metabase on AWS, when we deployed Metabase using Elastic Beanstalk on AWS, we set everything up so that our traffic is served over HTTP. Nowadays, almost all websites use HTTPS over HTTP. HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP, where traffic is encrypted using public-key encryption and SSL certificates. That means that HTTP is not encrypted, which means that requests and responses are sent in plaintext and can be eavesdropped on by third parties.

Since HTTPS is the industry standard these days and we're going to be dealing with sensitive data in Metabase, we should definitely use it. Let's learn how to set it up.

Creating an SSL certificate in AWS

AWS has a service called AWS Certificate Manager that lets you create Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. What these certificates actually are is beyond the scope of this book. Before creating one, check to see whether your domain and subdomain already have one. If not,...