Because serverless tech is so new, sometimes we find ourselves waiting for features that ought to have been available from the start. Today, Stackery can check-off another feature that will make it much easier for people to start building serverless Rest Apis.

One fundamental aspect of building a Rest Api is the domain you use to host it. The first iteration of Stackery required our users to do the following to deploy a Rest Api:

1. Acquire a domain name
2. Acquire an SSL certificate for the domain
3. Create a Custom Domain in AWS API Gateway
4. Manually tell Stackery your Custom Domain information
5. Update the DNS record for the domain

Since building a Rest Api was one of the key features of Stackery and serverless tech, this was a big hurdle for users to overcome when they were just getting started.

About six months ago AWS added the ability to use Amazon Certificate Manager to provision and use free certificates with API Gateway. This was a big improvement, since certificates either cost money or require a lot of extra hassle to acquire through a free service like Let's Encrypt. Even still, you had to manually create a Custom Domain in API Gateway before you could use it for a Rest Api service built with Stackery.

Today we are excited to announce support for provisioning Custom Domains and SSL Certificates directly within Stackery! Simply provide a domain or subdomain you administer in the settings for a Rest Api node.

When you deploy, AWS will send an email to the domain administrators to approve the generation of a new SSL certificate. The approval process is as easy as opening the email and clicking "Approve". Once approved, the Custom Domain will be provisioned and linked to your new Rest Api. The only remaining manual step is to update your DNS records to point to your newly provisioned Api. (We plan to automate that in the future, too!)

We're excited to be knocking down a key barrier for people to begin using Stackery and serverless tech. If you're interested in trying it out, please request beta access!