AWS just announced free SSL/TLS certificates here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-certificate-manager-deploy-ssltls-based-apps-on-aws/
Mainly:
SSL/TLS certificates provisioned through AWS Certificate Manager are free!
and
You can provision, deploy, and renew certificates at no charge.
However, the blog post and articles do not seem to clarify whether the created certificates can be used on plain EC2 instances without ELB or Beanstalk.
It only says this:
Because ELB supports SSL offload, deploying a certificate to a load balancer (rather than to the EC2 instances behind it) will reduce the amount of encryption and decryption work that the instances need to handle.
and
We plan to add support for other AWS services and for other types of domain validation.
This linked article: https://medium.com/@arcdigital/enabling-ssl-via-aws-certificate-manager-on-elastic-beanstalk-b953571ef4f8#.2w5o4vq9p
says
There’s one caveat here: You must be using elastic beanstalk with an elastic load balancer (single instance environments without an ELB in front won’t work).
My question is: Can I access and use the SSL certificates generated by this service and will they be valid?