Cross Account DMS Replication for RDS instances behind Bastion machines - amazon-web-services

I have production stacks inside a Production account and development stacks inside a Development account. The stacks are identical and are setup as follows:
Each stack as its own VPC.
Within the VPC are two public subnets spanning to AZs and two private subnets spanning to AZs.
The private Subnets contain the RDS instance.
The public Subnets contain a Bastion EC2 instance which can access the RDS instance.
To access the RDS instance, I either have to SSH into the Bastion machine and access it from there, or I create an SSH tunnel via the Bastion to access it through a Database client application such as PGAdmin.
Current DMS setup:
I would like to be able to use DMS (Database Migration Service) to replication an RDS instance from Production into Development. So far I am trying the following but cannot get it to work:
Create a VPC peering connection between Development VPC and Production VPC
Create a replication instance in the private subnet of the Development VPC
Update the private subnet route tables in the development VPC to route traffic to the CIDR of the production VPC through the VPC peering connection
Ensure the Security group for the replication instance can access both RDS instances.
Main Problem:
When creating the source endpoint in DMS, the wizard only shows RDS instances from the same account and the same region, and only allows RDS instances to be configured using server names and ports, however, the RDS instances in my stacks can only be accessed via Bastion machines using tunnelling. Therefore the test endpoint connection always fails.
Any ideas of how to achieve this cross account replication?
Any good step by step blogs that detail how to do this? I have found a few but they don't seem to have RDS instances sitting behind bastion machines and so they all assume the endpoint configuration wizard can be populated using server names and ports.
Many thanks.

Securing the RDS instances via the Bastion host is sound security practice, of course, for developer/operational access.
For DMS migration service however, you should expect to open security group for both the Target and Source RDS database instances to allow the migration instance to have access to both.
From Network Security for AWS Database Migration Service:
The replication instance must have access to the source and target endpoints. The security group for the replication instance must have network ACLs or rules that allow egress from the instance out on the database port to the database endpoints.
Database endpoints must include network ACLs and security group rules that allow incoming access from the replication instance. You can achieve this using the replication instance's security group, the private IP address, the public IP address, or the NAT gateway’s public address, depending on your configuration.
See
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dms/latest/userguide/CHAP_Security.Network.html
For network addressing and to open the RDS private subnet, you'll need a NAT on both source and target. They can be added easily, and then terminated after the migration.
You can now use Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway, a highly available AWS managed service that makes it easy to connect to the Internet from instances within a private subnet in an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
See
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2015/12/introducing-amazon-vpc-nat-gateway-a-managed-nat-service/

Related

Can I use an AWS Client VPN endpoint to access more than three subnets in the same region?

My VPC is in eu-west-2. I have two subnets for an RDS instance, split across two different availability zones for reasons of high availability: eu-west-2a and eu-west-2b. I also have a Redshift cluster in its own subnet in eu-west-2c.
With this configuration, I have successfully configured an AWS Client VPN endpoint so that I can access RDS and Redshift from my local machine when connected to a VPN client with the appropriate configuration.
While following the same principles of using subnets for specific services, I would like my EC2 instances to live in private subnets that are also only accessible over a VPN connection. However, one of the limitations of the Client VPN service is:
You cannot associate multiple subnets from the same Availability Zone with a Client VPN endpoint.
This implies that I would need to create a separate endpoint for connecting to my private EC2 subnet—which feels like complete overkill for my modest networking architecture!
Is there a workaround?
By default, a subnet can reach the other subnets.
This means that you won't need to do anything. This will work out of the box. If not, check the route tables and see if there is a route from your VPN subnet to your private subnet.
When you associate the first subnet with the Client VPN endpoint, the following happens:
The state of the Client VPN endpoint changes to available. Clients can now establish a VPN connection, but they cannot access any resources in the VPC until you add the authorization rules.
The local route of the VPC is automatically added to the Client VPN endpoint route table. (This local route allows you to communicate with every subnet within the VPC that the subnet is in.)
The VPC's default security group is automatically applied for the Client VPN endpoint.
See documentation for details.

Connect a Database with an Amazon VPC from local

Just created an VPC for EKS Cluster and started RDS PostgreSQL instance with custom VPC.
Custom VPC has Subnets.
My Custom VPC has Internet Gateway attached.
EKS and RDS is in same VPC so they have internal communication.
My problem is that i want to connect to RDS from my local machine and i am unable. Regarding the problem i have created a new Security Group with Inbound Rules for PostgreSQL.
PostgreSQL TCP 5432 0.0.0.0/0 –
Im still unable to connect
UPDATE
RDS is Publicly accessible
Security group allows access to RDS
In order to connect to RDS instances from the internet you need to do these 3 things
Deploy your RDS instance in a "public" subnet. This means the subnet must have an Internet Gateway attached to it so it can respond properly to outbound requests
In your RDS instance under Connectivity, extend the Additional configuration section, and then choose Publicly accessible.
Make sure the security group allows access to your RDS instance.
Note: exposing a database to public access is not secure. What I recommend you to do is create a proxy with haproxy or a VPN.
To be able to connect to the RDS database remotely you need to select "yes" option for the "Public Accessibility" setting for you database. Here are some additional configurations that need to be taken into account (form AWS docs):
If you want your DB instance in the VPC to be publicly accessible, you
must enable the VPC attributes DNS hostnames and DNS resolution.
Your VPC must have a VPC security group that allows access to the DB
instance.
The CIDR blocks in each of your subnets must be large enough to
accommodate spare IP addresses for Amazon RDS to use during
maintenance activities, including failover and compute scaling.
Best,
Stefan

Amazon RDS and VPC Endpoints Connectivity

I am having an Amazon RDS Postgres instance which resides in the default VPC.
To connect to it, i am using different EC2 instances (Java Spring Boot and NodeJs) running in ElasticBeanstalk. These instances also reside in the default VPC.
Do these EC2 instances connect to/query the RDS instance through the internet or the calls do not leave the AWS Network?
If they leave the AWS network and the calls go through the internet, is creating a VPC endpoint the right solution? Or my whole understanding is incorrect.
Thanks a lot for your help.
Do these EC2 instances connect to/query the RDS instance through the internet or the calls do not leave the AWS Network?
The DNS of the RDS endpoint will resolve to private IP address when used from within VPC. So communication is private, even if you use public subnets or set your RDS instance as publicly available. However, for connection from outside of AWS, the RDS endpoint will resolve to public IP address if the db instance is publicly available.
If they leave the AWS network and the calls go through the internet, is creating a VPC endpoint the right solution?
There is no VPC endpoint for RDS client connections, only for management actions (creating db-instance, termination, etc). In contrast, Aurora Serverless has Data API with corresponding VPC endpoint.
To secure your DB-Instances communications you need to be sure at least about the following:
locate your RD in private subnet (route table does not contain default outbound route to internet gateway).
RDS security group just accept traffic inbound only from instances security group/groups on TCP port for PostgreSQL which is usually 5432.
In this case Traffice to RDS will go localy in your vpc, for vpc endpoints it can be used to access RDS API operations privatly which is not your case (you just need to connect your app to DB using connection string)

connecting to private aws rds

I'm new and trying to explore AWS and creating a test app running on IIS (EC2 set in Public) and MSSQL RDS(set in Private). However my IIS is not able to connect on the RDS. Looking on my IIS EC2 it has a defined private IP too, same subnet used also from RDS, security group of RDS allows the subnet of the EC2, IAM of EC2 also has RDS Full access.
But still my ec2 wont connect on the RDS. May I ask on what I'm missing on my settings?
It appears that your configuration is:
One VPC
A Public Subnet containing an Amazon EC2 instance
A Private Subnet containing an Amazon RDS for SQL Server instance
You are attempting to connect from the EC2 instance to the RDS db instance
For this to work, you should configure:
A Security Group (let's call it EC2-SG) that is associated with the EC2 instance, permitting connections such that you can login to the EC2 instance
A Security Group (RDS-SG) associated with the RDS db instance, with an incoming connection configured for SQL Server (port 1433) with source set to EC2-SG
That is, the database security group should ALLOW an incoming connection with a source of the security group that is associated to the EC2 instance. The VPC will automatically figure out the IP addresses — you do not need to specify them.
Then, connect from the EC2 instance to the RDS db instance via the DNS Name of the RDS instance that is given in the RDS console.

EC2 instance can't access to elasticache

As the title suggests, I'm struggling to connect to my elasticache instance via my EC2 instance. I have a orm to connect to redis in my EC2 instance that was just failing on my logs, so I sshed into my EC2 instance to try to manually connect to the redis instance and got a timeout:
Could not connect to Redis at <redis uri>: Connection timed out
They're in different VPC's (the elasticache instance and the EC2 instance), but in my elasticache instance's security group, I have a custom TCP inbound rule at port 6379 from any source.
Halp.
You setup the security rule, but did you setup the VPC peering properly:
A VPC peering connection is a networking connection between two VPCs
that enables you to route traffic between them using private IP
addresses. Instances in either VPC can communicate with each other as
if they are within the same network. You can create a VPC peering
connection between your own VPCs, or with a VPC in another AWS account
within a single region.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/PeeringGuide/Welcome.html
After you create VPC Peer connection, you also need to modify routing table.
Keep in mind that you need to modify BOTH of the routing tables.
Also you need to add CIDR of the local VPC.
It can be confusing which is "local" VPC and which is "target".
In my case, the local VPC contained EC2 instances that needed Redis database in other VPC. After creating peer connection in this format, I needed to do two things:
edit routing table for both local and target VPC.
edit security group of Redis database to accept connections from local VPC.
If set accordingly, you should be able to connect from EC2 instance at local VPC to Redis database in target VPC.
Here is documentation from AWS that is relatively easy to follow:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/PeeringGuide/vpc-pg.pdf
Your scenario can be found on page 16.