I spent a greater part of this day attempting to get nginx, SSL, and EC2 to play nice together. The funny thing was that nginx (which was hosting a mongrel_cluster) would serve standard HTTP requests just fine, but HTTPS requests just kind of hung there.
I could see that nginx was in fact listening to port 443 and could connect locally, but the whole shebang fizzled out anywhere outside the local box. No firewall either.
After pulling my hair out for a bit, I happened across this article that alluded to the 'ec2-authorize' command.
Seems as though you have to remotely manage the "firewall" of a running instance!
Anyhow; cutting to the chase: To enable HTTPS on your EC2 instance just run:
ec2-authorize default -p 443
Damn, yeah, i was looking at my iptables and shaking my head, checked all the PHP/apache settings to see if something was causing it to fail, the
ec2-authorize default -p 443
seems to work fine.