Deploy a global Google-managed certificate with DNS authorization

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

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

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

If you want to deploy to cross-region load balancers or regional load balancers, see the following:

Objectives

This tutorial shows you how to complete the following tasks:

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

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.

    Roles required to select or create a project

    • Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
    • Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator role (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains the resourcemanager.projects.create permission. Learn how to grant roles.

    Go to project selector

  3. Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

  4. Enable the Compute Engine, Certificate Manager APIs.

    Roles required to enable APIs

    To enable APIs, you need the serviceusage.services.enable permission. If you created the project, then you likely already have this permission through the Owner role (roles/owner). Otherwise, you can get this permission through the Service Usage Admin role (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin). Learn how to grant roles.

    Enable the APIs

  5. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

  6. If you're using an external identity provider (IdP), you must first sign in to the gcloud CLI with your federated identity.

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

    gcloud init

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

    Roles required to select or create a project

    • Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
    • Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator role (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains the resourcemanager.projects.create permission. Learn how to grant roles.

    Go to project selector

  9. Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

  10. Enable the Compute Engine, Certificate Manager APIs.

    Roles required to enable APIs

    To enable APIs, you need the serviceusage.services.enable permission. If you created the project, then you likely already have this permission through the Owner role (roles/owner). Otherwise, you can get this permission through the Service Usage Admin role (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin). Learn how to grant roles.

    Enable the APIs

  11. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

  12. If you're using an external identity provider (IdP), you must first sign in to the gcloud CLI with your federated identity.

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

    gcloud init
  14. Create a public DNS zone

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:

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:

Create a Google-managed certificate with DNS authorization

Before you create the certificate, create a public DNS zone. Then, create a DNS authorization and add the CNAME record to the target DNS zone.

Create a DNS authorization

A DNS authorization only covers a single domain name. You must create a separate DNS authorization for each domain name that you want to use with the target certificate.

If you're creating a DNS authorization for a wildcard certificate, such as *.myorg.example.com, configure the DNS authorization for the parent domain—for example, myorg.example.com.

Console

You can create a DNS authorization or attach an existing DNS authorization when creating a certificate. For more information, see Create a Google-managed certificate referencing the DNS authorization.

gcloud

You can create two types of DNS authorizations: FIXED_RECORD or PER_PROJECT_RECORD. For more information, see DNS authorization.

FIXED_RECORD DNS authorization

To create a FIXED_RECORD DNS authorization, use the following gcloud certificate-manager dns-authorizations create command:

gcloud certificate-manager dns-authorizations create AUTHORIZATION_NAME \
    --domain="DOMAIN_NAME" \
    --type=[FIXED_RECORD]

Replace the following:

  • AUTHORIZATION_NAME: the name of the DNS authorization.
  • DOMAIN_NAME: the name of the target domain for which you are creating this DNS authorization. The domain name must be a fully qualified domain name, such as myorg.example.com.

After creating the FIXED_RECORD DNS authorization, verify it with the gcloud certificate-manager dns-authorizations describe command:

gcloud certificate-manager dns-authorizations describe AUTHORIZATION_NAME

The output is similar to the following. In the output, find the dnsResourceRecord section. Locate the CNAME record and add the record's details (data,name, and type) to your DNS configuration.

createTime: '2022-01-14T13:35:00.258409106Z'
dnsResourceRecord:
  data: 0e40fc77-a37d-4eb8-8fe1-eea2e18d12d9.4.authorize.certificatemanager.goog.
  name: _acme-challenge.myorg.example.com.
  type: CNAME
domain: myorg.example.com
name: projects/myProject/locations/global/dnsAuthorizations/myAuthorization
updateTime: '2022-01-14T13:35:01.571086137Z'

PER_PROJECT_RECORD DNS authorization

To create a PER_PROJECT_RECORD DNS authorization, use the following gcloud certificate-manager dns-authorizations create command:

gcloud certificate-manager dns-authorizations create