We use wildcard certs (*.example.com) so each customer can have vanity-customer-name.example.com domains. I think our model is fairly common for multi-tenant domain name segregated systems.
For example, Application Load Balancers (ALB) come with a limit of max 25 certificates, which is non-starter for us. So you cannot avoid terminating your TLS in nginx/caddy etc (it also needs to be HA of course) and then hit another LB that stands in front of the actual service. You end up with a 2-layer LB architecture that adds cost and complexity.
The biggest operational headache by far is on renewals. If one customer on a commingled certificate adds a CAA record that doesn't include your CA of choice (or more commonly, the customer churns and no longer points to you), your renewal fails. If you're running a SaaS business you really want one certificate per hostname that's lazy loaded based on the incoming SNI. This keeps renewal failures and support costs down, and keeps customers from seeing a list of their competitors on their certificate.
As @elithar points out, that's why we built SSL for SaaS. You make a single API call with the name of the hostname you want a certificate issued for, indicate the validation method (HTTP ./well-known is by far the "happiest path"), and then in about a minute you've got a certificate deployed worldwide. You tell us where to route traffic back to by providing a default origin (which can be a load balancer) and optionally overriding it on a per-hostname basis.
So long as your customer is CNAME'ing to your domain and that domain resolves to Cloudflare's edge, we can automatically complete—and keep completing—domain control validation (DCV). We then issue two certificates per hostname: one P-256 keyed, SHA-2/ECDSA signed certificate that gets presented to modern browsers[1] and one RSA 2048-bit, SHA-2/RSA signed certificate that gets presented to browsers that don't support ECC.
1 - https://blog.cloudflare.com/tls-certificate-optimization-tec...
> You make a single API call with the name of the hostname you want a certificate issued for ... [magic TLS things happen]
This, precisely, is how the ALB _should_ work, without a silly 25-certificate limitation. Sounds like an excellent service.
I wonder what is the cost of issuance for a TLS certificate. There is minimal storage/network load, some computations (likely in hardware). Perhaps the main cost is the collection of sufficient entropy?
You should reach out to https://twitter.com/prdonahue (PM), who can share the details.
(Used to work there, now at GCP)
Here is what Caddy's author wrote about this:
> I still don't like the idea of SAN certificates. Too much room for error... what if you go to renew a SAN and one of the domains fail, the other 99 don't get renewed either. (Sure, we can code in logic to make a different certificate with 99 names, but that gets complicated quickly.) Also, we'd need a database as we have a many-to-many relationship rather than 1:1 which is much easier.
Source: https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/831#issuecomment-22011...