I'd like to know if there is an approach to automatically join an EC2 instance (launched via ElasticBeantalk) to an Active Directory already hosted in an EC2 Windows Server.
Following this document below I could see that is possible using AD Connector or AWS Simple AD (either will give a "directoryId)," but in my case, the AD already is hosted in an EC2.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-configure-your-ec2-instances-to-automatically-join-a-microsoft-active-directory-domain/
You can do it by following the same path - but instead of relying to the default SSM document for Managed AD, you should create a custom one.
In it, you can omit the directory id and rely on DNS name / IP address of your EC2 AD and respective domain name, username and password with which you join.
This approach is partially described in the following blog post. It has an actual SSM document as a CloudFormation stack which you can use as a base.
In order to fully automate it you can create an Amazon EventBridge rule that will be looking for EC2 Launch instance events and has SSM Run Command as a target (Run Command can start your custom SSM document). There are some dedicated Beanstalk events that may be useful in this regard as well.
Related
I need to retrieve existing data/properties of a given resource by using an AWS Cloudformation template. Is it possible? If it is how can I do it?
Example 1:
Output: Security Group ID which allows traffic on port 22
Example 2:
Output: Instance ID which use default VPC
AWS CloudFormation is used to deploy infrastructure from a template in a repeatable manner. It cannot provide information on any resources created by any methods outside of CloudFormation.
Your requirements seem more relevant to AWS Config:
AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account. This includes how the resources are related to one another and how they were configured in the past so that you can see how the configurations and relationships change over time.
An AWS resource is an entity you can work with in AWS, such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume, a security group, or an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Using your examples, AWS Config can list EC2 instances and any resources that are connected to the instances, such as Security Groups and VPCs. You can easily click-through these relationship and view the configurations. It is also possible to view how these configurations have changed over time, such as:
When EC2 instance changed state (eg stopped, running)
When rules changed on Security Groups
Alternatively, you can simply make API calls to AWS services to obtain the current configuration of resources, such as calling DescribeInstances to obtain a list of Amazon EC2 instances and their configurations.
We're using the Ansible ec2 module to start instances in an external teams environment, and the module succeeds from the Ansible end but looking at the console it does not register any changes. We are able to successfully stop instances, but not start instances. I've tried to mimic the behavior using the AWSCLI from our AWS bastion host, and that produces the same error where the VM goes into a 'Pending' state, but does not start. We've configured the AWSCLI to use an IAM Profile for authentication vs AWS keys due to constraints from our client, we use this same configuration for our AWS Ansible modules. The profile seems like it has all the necessary permissions based on the AWS documentation. Currently it has the 'AmazonEC2FullAccess' policy as the only policy associated with our role. I would think that would be enough, if we're able to stop instances successfully via those policies, why wouldn't we be able to start? Unless there may be another permission needed? What are we doing incorrectly?
so I recently asked a question about how to provision instances that depend on each other. The answer I got was that I could instantiate the 3 instances, then have a null resource with a remote-exec provisioner that would update each instances.
It works great, except that in order to work my instances need to be configured to allow ssh. And since they are in a private subnet, I first need to allow ssh in a public instance that will then bootstrap my 3 instances. This bootstrap operation requires allowing ssh on 4 instances that really don't need to once the bootstrap is complete. This is not that bad, as I can still restrict the traffic to known ip/subnet, but I still thought it was worth asking if there was some ways to avoid that problem.
Can I update the security group of running instances in a single terraform plan? Example: Instantiate 3 instances with security_group X, provision them through ssh, then update the instances with security_group Y, thus disallowing ssh. If so, how? If not, are there any other solutions to this problem?
Thanks.
Based on the comments.
Instead of ssh, you could use AWS Systems Manager Run Command:
AWS Systems Manager Run Command lets you remotely and securely manage the configuration of your managed instances. Run Command enables you to automate common administrative tasks and perform ad hoc configuration changes at scale.
This would require making your instances to be recognized by AWS Systems Manager (SSM) which requires three things:
network connectivity to SSM service. Since your instances are in private subnet, they either have to connect to the SSM service using NAT gateway or VPC interface endpoints for SSM.
SSM Agent installed and running. This is usually not an issue as most offical AMI on AWS already have it setup.
Instance role with AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore AWS managed policy.
Since run-command is not supported by terraform, you either have to use local-exec to run the command through AWS CLI, or through lambda function using aws_lambda_invocation.
I have been setting up Amazon EC2 Systems Manager in order to manage our Windows patch management setup. All looking good so far as we can get the on premises servers listed in the console using the activation.
I have activated the following servers on the same activation (without entering a name as part of the activation). As I have now around 5 managed instances on there they have no name. In the MI section I can see the computer name but when it comes to the run command or to do anything I am only able to see the instance ID.
AWS ECS Systems Manager - Managed Instances, need to be able to set the name
How can I go back and update the name for these managed instances? Don't really have to add each server on a seperate individual activation again?
Thanks
You can set the name of your managed instances by setting the Name tag on the instance. At the moment you have to use the AWS CLI or the AWS PowerShell tools to do this, but once done you'll see the name in the console.
You can find the AWS CLI documentation here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ssm/add-tags-to-resource.html
> aws ssm add-tags-to-resource --resource-type ManagedInstance --resource-id <your managed instance id> --tags Key=Name,Value=<instance name<
Hope this helps.
I created a Amazon AWS EC2 instance under my account and made an website/ftp on it, now a new partner wants to move the instance under his company account so his company can pay the bills.
We can't change the instance IP because banks in the region are communicating with the server.
How can I move the instance to a different account without having to change anything on the configuration?
The short answer is: No, you cannot move an running instance from one account to another unless and ofcourse AWS Technical support has some magic available behind the curtains.
You can However, Create an AMI from this instance and share this AMI with other users/account. refer: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/530
To share or migrate EC2 instances from a source account to a target
account follow these steps:
Create a custom Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
from the instance you want to share or migrate. Be sure to include all
required EBS data volumes in the AMI.
Note: Data stored on instance store volumes isn't preserved in AMIs, and won't be on the instance store volumes of the instances
that you launch from the AMI.
Share the AMI with the target account
using either the EC2 console or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).
From the target account, find the AMI
using the EC2 console or the AWS CLI.
Launch a new instance from the shared AMI
on the target account.
Note: The private IP address of VPC instances will be different in the new account, unless you specifically set them during
launch.
Related information
Changing the Encryption State of Your Data
AWS CLI Command Reference (EC2)
Source: Transfer Amazon EC2 Instance
This is not possible.
AWS Support does not have access to copy Amazon EC2 resources or
manipulate any configuration options in AWS accounts. You can't
separate an AWS account from an Amazon.com account or transfer
resources between AWS accounts. It is possible to manually migrate
Amazon EC2 resources from one account to another by completing the
steps described here.
Source : https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/account-transfer-ec2-instance/
I'm working with several hundreds on EC2 instances in several AWS regions and accounts. You can move an EC2 instance to another AWS account, however, you can't move the Elastic IP and it will take up 16 steps with AWS CLI, if you want to migrate Tags and clone the Security Groups. I wrote a detailed post with the whole process at https://medium.com/#gmusumeci/how-to-move-an-ec2-instance-to-another-aws-account-e5a8f04cef21.
there are more than 10 steps involved in doing the cloud move. I would suggest you use Infrastructure as a Configuration (terraform and CloudFormation) or Infrastructure as a real code (pulumi and CDK)
however if you want to give a go at a nice tool I found called KopiCloud. Please feel welcome to try it and leave your comments below. Is good if you need to move instances on a quick lift and shift scenario.
You can re-think the design of having the banks in the region communicating to your servers via IP.
If the banks communicate using DNS names, you have much more flexibility to move your servers around.
You can also achieve improvements in high availability and resiliency by moving to DNS connections.
So a plan might be
Setup a DNS record for your existing server
Get the banks who connect to your server to connect via the DNS name
Setup your new server in the other account (other answers describe this)
Cut the banks over to your new server in the new account simply by updating the DNS record
I haven't tried load balancing across accounts, but that may be another option, which would give you HA as a bonus. By registering your current instance, and new instance in another account as targets with a load balancer and getting your clients to connect to the load balancer, you could cut over to the other account. The only part I haven't tried is registering targets in different accounts, but looks like this should be possible with an AWS Network Load Balancer