Certificates to be used with application load balancer (ELB / 2.0) must be created in ACM in the same area as balancing.
Certificates to be used with CloudFront must always be created in us-east-1.
To use an ACM certificate with Amazon CloudFront, you must request or import a certificate in the US region (Northern Virginia). The ACM certificates in this region associated with the CloudFront distribution apply to all geographic locations configured for this distribution.
- http://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-regions.html
The reason for this is that CloudFront does not follow the regional edge model in AWS. CloudFront edge regions are located all over the world, but are configured and managed from us - east-1 - think of it as a CloudFront domain. As soon as the distribution reaches Deployed state, it does not depend on the us-east-1 operating system, but during preparation everything comes from this region, so there is only an ACM area that CloudFront can access.
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