In order to support SSL for a simple Tornado server on EC2, a certificate is required. This process seems harder than it should be, so I thought I’d share the process that recently worked for me.

There are several tradeoffs to consider:

• Certificate Authority (CA) Reputation (‘Self Sign’ – VeriSign)
• Price (Free – $3000/year)
• Domain Coverage: (Single, Multi, Wildcard)

After considering these options and reading about other people’s experiences, I concluded that GoDaddy is the least expensive, reasonably well respected CA. At GoDaddy the wildcard option is 15 times as expensive as the standard single domain certificate (with discount), so it’s a better deal to buy single domain certs even if you need a few.

Steps I took:

1. Search Google for GoDaddy SSL deal.
2. Login to GoDaddy and buy a single domain certificate for $12.99/year.
3. Go to ‘My Account’, click SSL Certificates. Activate your purchased token. Wait a few minutes.
4. Configure your cert. Choose “Third party server”. Provide a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) for your domain (see below).
5. Download the cert. Use the cert along with your .key file from the CSR generation process to setup SSL on your server(s).

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As part of Pulse’s recent announcement of crossing the 11M user mark (up 10x since last year!), we’ve written a set of blog posts to share how we’ve scaled our backend infrastructure to keep up with our new users and support some powerful new features. Here’s a quick recap of our systems on both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google App Engine (GAE), along with links to the detailed posts describing each.

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In addition to the regular Pulse Blog where we regularly share updates about our latest features and new content, Pulse now has an Engineering Blog!  The goal is to share some of the exciting engineering work that goes into bringing users the Pulse experience they’ve come to expect. To kick things off I added a post about Using Data Analysis to Discover Top Stories.  In the post I share a bit about how we use AWS to collect and analyse our data, along with how we serve up the feeds we build via AppEngine.  Check it out!