I made and deployed my Django application in AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It has a connection to a Postgres DB in RDS, through the EBS console.
When I click configuration -> network in EBS, I see: "This environment is not part of a VPC."
How can I make it a part of a VPC? Thanks!
NOTE: very new to this ;)
You have to recreate the Elastic Beanstalk environment and pick the VPC during the creation. It is not possible to move an existing environment into a VPC.
But, unless you have access to EC2-Classic, the EC2 servers that were launched are already be in a VPC. They are just in the default VPC. But as far as Elastic Beanstalk is concerned, it seems oblivious to this.
I am not sure if there are any features that are exclusively available to VPC environments. My suggestion is to try to use your current environment, and if you happen to recreate the environment later for some other reason, then you can try picking a VPC and see if it offers anything new.
As already explained by #stefansundin you can't move existing EB into a custom VPC. You have to create new one.
These are general steps to consider:
Create a custom VPC with public and private subnets as described in the docs: VPC with public and private subnets (NAT). NAT is needed for instances and rds in private subnet to communicate with internet, but no inbound internet traffic will be allowed. This ensures that your instances and rds are not accessible from the outside.
Create new RDS, external to EB. This is good practice as otherwise the lifetime of your RDS is coupled with EB environment. Starting point is the following AWS documentation: Launching and connecting to an external Amazon RDS instance in a default VPC
Create new EB environment and ensure to customize its settings to use the VPC. Pass the RDS endpoint to the EB instances using environmental variables. Depending on how you want to handle password to the RDS, there are few options, starting from using environmental variables (low security) through SSM Parameter Store (free) or AWS Secrets Manager (not free).
Setting this all up correctly can be difficult for someone new to AWS. But with patience and practice it can be done. Thus, I would recommend with starting with default VPC, as you have now. Then once you are comfortable with how to work with external RDS, think on creating custom VPC as described.
Related
Before moving to Amazon Web Services, I was using Google Cloud Platform to develop my aplication, CloudSQL to be specific, and GCP have something called Cloud SQL Proxy that allows me to connect to my CloudSQL instance using my computer, instead of having to deploy my code to the server and then test it. How can I make the same thing using AWS?
I have a python environment on Elastic Beanstalk, that uses Amazon RDS.
AWS is deny be default so you cannot access an RDS instance outside of the VPC that your application is running in. With that being said... you can connect to the RDS instance via a VPN that can be stood up in EC2 that has rules open to the RDS instance. This would allow you to connect to the VPN on whatever developer machine and then access the RDS instance as if your dev box was in the VPC. This is my preferred method because it is more secure. Only those with access to the VPN have access to the RDS instance. This has worked well for me in a production sense.
The VPN provider that I use is https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/OpenVPN-Inc-OpenVPN-Access-Server/B00MI40CAE
Alternatively you could open up a hole in your VPC to the RDS instance and make it publicly available. I don't recommend this however because it will leave your RDS instance open to attack as it is publicly exposed.
You can expose your AWS RDS to the internet by proper VPC setting, I did it before.
But it has some risks
So usually you can use those ways to figure it out:
Create a local database server and restore snapshot from your AWS RDS
or use VPN to connect to your private subnet which hold your RDS
A couple people have suggested putting your RDS instance in a public subnet, and allowing access from the internet.
This is generally considered to be a bad idea, and should be the last resort.
So you have a couple of options for getting access to RDS in a private subnet.
The first option is to set up networking between your local network and your AWS VPC. You can do this with Direct Connect, or with a point-point VPN. But based on your question, this isn't something you feel comfortable with.
The second option is to set up a bastion server in the public subnet, and use ssh port forwarding to get local access to the RDS over the SSH tunnel.
You don't say if you on linux or Windows, but this can be accomplished on either OS.
What I did to solve was:
Go to Elastic Beanstalk console
Chose you aplication
Go to Configurations
Click on the endpoint of your database in Databases
Click on the identifier of your DB Instance
In security group rules click in the security groups
Click in the inbound tab
Click edit
Change type to All Traffic and source to Anywhere
Save
This way you can expose the RDS connected to your Elastic Beanstalk aplication to the internet, which is not recommended as people sugested, but it is what I was looking for.
Can someone please clearly explain in a step-by-step guide and in simple terms from start to finish how to properly setup a private RDS instance that connects to:
Elastic Beanstalk instance where the the environment is using a load balancing, auto scaling web server environment using PHP as it’s platform.
MySQL Workbench
Side note, the EB and RDS instance(s) are all in the same VPC. I suppose in reality this may be more of a how to properly setup and connect IAM profiles and roles question.
In essence, I want to restrict all internet access from the RDS instance, while still allowing my EB instance or other resources i.e other EC2 instances (all located in the same VPC) the ability to connect to the RDS instance, while also allowing me to use (connect to) a DB tool like MySQL Workbench.
Elastic Beanstalk Security Questions:
Instance Profile: How should I setup/config this role and it’s associated policy
Service Profile: How should I setup/config this role and it’s associated policy
RDS Security Questions:
VPC Security Groups: How should I setup/config this security group(s) to allow access from EB instance, other specified resources (EC2), and MySQL Workbench
I'm following AWS's instructions Scenario 2: VPC with Public and Private Subnets and am having issues at the point I try to launch a DB server.
When I launch my instance, all is fine and I am able to assign it to my newly created VPC. However, when it comes to launch the RDS, the only VPC available (on step 4, configure advanced settings) is the default VPC (ie not the one I created as per their instructions).
Has anyone any idea about this or indeed how to resolve it?
RDS requires a little more setup than an EC2 instance if you want to launch it within a VPC.
Specifically, you need to create:
a DB subnet group within the VPC
a VPC security group for the RDS instance
The documentation is a little buried in the AWS RDS documents. It can be found here:
Creating a DB Instance in a VPC
I've created a new environment for my beanstalk app under a vpc.
I created a vpc with private and public subnets.
I've configured the security groups as outlined here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/AWSHowTo-vpc-basic.html
The environment seemed to setup correctly but the status is red.
Clicking on monitor reveals no data for latency or requests.
The website url returns error code 503.
Not sure what to do
This is almost certainly an issue with not being able to communicate with the NAT. The documentation is a little ambiguous when it comes to configuring your .ebextensions config files.
Don't mess with the Network ACLs for the VPC. The infrastructure needs to be able to talk to itself.
The NAT instance & Beanstalk ELB need to be in the Public subnet (10.0.0.0/24)
The Beanstalk instances themselves need to be in the Private subnet (10.0.1.0/24)
The Security Group that you apply to the instances needs to also apply to the NAT. That Security Group also needs to be on its own Inbound list so that everything inside that SG can talk to each other.
Using curl, try to make outbound calls. First on the Bastion Host, then on the NAT, then on a Beanstalk instance. Are any of them unable to make outbound calls?
I just recently spent a couple of weeks trying to develop a CloudFormation template that handles this stuff. I think that most of it is still in my brain. I think.
If these troubleshooting steps don't help, let me know and I'll dig a little deeper.
When you created the VPC, I assume you did it using the wizard. In this situation, the NAT is configured to accept calls from "default" security group.
When you created the Elastic beanstalk environment, did you specify that you want the new instances to be on "default" security group?
Check if the new instance belongs to the VPC's default security group in EC2 management area. If it is not a member of default Security group, add this security group to your NAT's inbound connections.
There is a good AWS CloudFormation template example to create VPC with public and private subnets and the NATs:
https://github.com/awsdocs/elastic-beanstalk-samples/blob/9720e38e9da155752dce132a31d8e13a27364b83/cfn-templates/vpc-privatepublic.yaml
May be very useful for those having issues with such VPC configuration.
To deploy it to your AWS using cli:
aws cloudformation deploy --stack-name mystackname --template-file path/to/vpc-privatepublic.yaml
Or you can deploy from CloudFormation UI dashboard.
I have an external server hosted and managed on my side. There's another server I use, which is based on Amazon EC2. I would like to get them to work together using Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud).
Is that possible? If so, how can it be done?
If you intend to migrate your EC2 instance to a VPC, then no, you can not. You will require to create a new instance inside your VPC and replicate the setup and data. The fastest way to accomplish this is creating an AMI from your current EC2 instance and deploy it as a new instance inside VPC.
Furthermore, if your VPC instance is deployed in a private subnet, you will have to deploy a public NAT instance, configure the NAT instance DST-NAT rules to map external ports to your app instance, setup the VPC routing tables properly and adjust the security groups in order to allow forwarding traffic.
Now, about the external server, if you are going to migrate it to VPC, I would recommend you to directly create a new instance with a prebuilt standard Amazon AMI and then manully replicate configuration and data. There are some VM migration tools but my experience with such tools has not been friendly so...