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This page provides an overview of how to use Certificate Manager to provision Google-managed and self-managed certificates for Application Load Balancers and proxy Network Load Balancers.

Before reading this page, ensure that you're familiar with the SSL certificates overview in the Cloud Load Balancing documentation.

Certificate Manager configuration methods

Certificate Manager offers two certificate configuration methods for Application Load Balancers using target HTTPS proxies and proxy Network Load Balancers using target SSL proxies. These are two of three possible certificate configuration methods for Cloud Load Balancing. For more information about Certificate Manager and Cloud Load Balancing, see Certificate configuration methods in the load balancing documentation.

• Load balancer's target proxy references a Certificate Manager certificate map: the load balancer's target proxy references a single certificate map. The certificate map supports thousands of entries by default, and can scale to millions of entries. This method is used by external Application Load Balancers and external proxy Network Load Balancers that are powered by Google Front Ends (GFEs):

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

• Load balancer's target proxy references Certificate Manager certificates directly: the load balancer's target proxy can reference up to 100 Certificate Manager certificates. This method is used by the following Application Load Balancers that are powered by managed open-source Envoy proxy software:

  • Regional external Application Load Balancers
  • Regional internal Application Load Balancers
  • Cross-region internal Application Load Balancers

Certificate Manager also supports the following products, which reference Certificate Manager certificates as part of their configuration:

• Secure Web Proxy gateway references Certificate Manager certificates: before you can configure a Secure Web Proxy gateway, you create one or more Certificate Manager certificates for the gateway to use. For more information, see Deploy an SSL certificate and Deploy a Secure Web Proxy instance.

• Media CDN edge cache service references Certificate Manager certificates: a Media CDN edge cache service supports up to five Certificate Manager certificates. For more information, see SSL (TLS) Certificates and Configure SSL (TLS) certificates.

Certificate types

Certificate Manager supports both Google-managed and self-managed certificates. All Application Load Balancers using target HTTPS proxies and all proxy Network Load Balancers that support target SSL proxies can use either Google-managed or self-managed Certificate Manager certificates.

• Google-managed Certificate Manager certificates: certificates that Google Cloud obtains and manages for you. Depending on the load balancer and its Certificate Manager configuration method, Google-managed Certificate Manager certificates can be provisioned by using load balancer authorization, DNS authorization, or by using Certificate Authority Service (CA Service).

• Self-managed Certificate Manager certificates: certificates that you obtain, provision, and renew yourself.

Product support

The following table summarizes the support for Google-managed and self-managed Certificate Manager certificates by product.

What's next

• If you want to migrate an existing certificate from your load balancer to Certificate Manager, follow the instructions in Migrate a certificate to Certificate Manager.
• For more information about Certificate Manager and GFE-based load balancers, see How Certificate Manager works.
• If you want to use mutual TLS authentication (mTLS), see Mutual TLS authentication in the Cloud Load Balancing documentation.