Why SSL Certificates Scale Better Than SSH

Author

Govardhana M K
April 17, 2025

In partnership with

TechOps Examples

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IN TODAY'S EDITION

🧠 Use Case

  • Why SSL Certificates Scale Better Than SSH

🚀 Top News

  • State of Code Security in 2025

    • 35% of GitHub repositories are public, exposing code to potential attackers.

    • 61% of organizations have leaked cloud secrets, like API keys and access tokens.

👀 Remote Jobs

📚️ Resources

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🧠 USE CASE

Why SSL Certificates Scale Better Than SSH

We DevOps and Cloud Engineers use SSH and SSL every day, but for very different reasons.

SSH is how we log into servers. It's authentication and remote shell access. You generate a keypair with ssh-keygen, copy the public key to the server, and you're in.

How SSH works

SSL is how we secure services. It's encryption and identity for traffic between browsers, APIs, and services enabled using certificates like those from Let's Encrypt or AWS ACM.

How SSL works

In short:

In a typical SSH setup, every user has a keypair, and the server stores public keys. If you’ve worked on legacy fleets or unmanaged clusters, you know what’s coming: SSH key sprawl.

I saw a case where 8 engineers were rotating on-call duties. Over time, they accumulated 45 public keys across 30 EC2 instances. Some belonged to interns who had left. Some were from CI runners we no longer used. No expiry, no labels, no audit.

Worse, people were doing ssh-copy-id directly or using Ansible with inventory files that were never cleaned.

To clean it up, they had to:

  • Run find ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on every node

  • Build an internal tool to map keys to owners based on fingerprints

  • Rotate all keys using ssh-keygen -R and centralized provisioning via SSH certificates

It was a mess. And we swore to never let SSH become the main trust system again.

When we switched to ALB-based apps on AWS, we used ACM certificates for TLS termination. The setup was a one liner in Terraform:

listener {

port = 443

protocol = "HTTPS"

ssl_policy = "ELBSecurityPolicy-TLS13-1-3-2021-06"

certificate_arn = aws_acm_certificate.app_cert.arn }

The certs renewed automatically. Zero manual rotation.

Here’s the kicker: SSL certificates expire by design, are traceable, and bind to services, not users. That makes them scalable.

If you’re building for scale, use SSL for service-to-service, client-to-server, or browser-to-backend.

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