title: Questions about CSR and SSL Certificates
body: <p>I'm in the process of connecting to an external server and am making a CSR to receive some certificates from them, and I have some questions regarding this.</p>
  
  <p>Some tutorials state that you should save the private key as this will be used during installation of the certificate. However when using the Windows certificate manager (certmgr.msc) I think it generates the private key under the hood, and the resulting CSR-file does not contain any private key. So in that case I won't have access to any private key at all, unless I can export it from the certificate I receive later? I was also under the impression that a private key is not needed for installation of the certificate as it is just imported into the certificate store? If that's the case, does the private key have any use besides generating the public key?</p>
  
  <p>I was also wondering about the location the certificate can be used. It seems that the certificate can only be used on the server that the CSR was created. However, my application will run on Azure so how can I get a certificate that can be used in the cloud?</p>
  
  <p>Last question: The certificate provider supplies three certificates, one root, one intermediate and one "actual" certificate. What is the purpose of these different certificates?</p>
  
  <p>Appreciate any insight or guiding to this process. There are a tons of guides out there, but many of them seem to contradict each other in some way or another.</p>