We have a number of 3rd party systems which are not part of our AWS account and not under our control, each of these systems have an internal iis server set up with dns which is only available from the local computer. This iis server holds an API which we want to be able to utilise from our EC2 instances.
My idea is to set up some type of vpn connection between the ec2 instance and the 3rd party system so that the ec2 instance can use the same internal dns to call the api.
AWS provide direct connect, is the correct path go down in order to do this? If it is, can anyone provide any help on how to move forward, if its not, what is the correct route for this?
Basically we have a third party system, on this third party system is an IIS server running some software which contains an API. So from the local machine I can run http://<domain>/api/get and it returns a JSON lot of code. However in order to get on to the third party system, we are attached via a VPN on an individual laptop. We need our EC2 instance in AWS to be able to access this API, so need to connect to the third party via the same VPN connection. So I think I need within AWS a separate VPC.
The best answer depends on your budget, bandwidth and security requirements.
Direct Connect is excellent. This services provides a dedicated physical network connection from your point of presence to Amazon. Once Direct Connect is configured and running your will then configure a VPN (IPSEC) over this connection. Negative: long lead times to install the fibre and relatively expensive. Positives, high security and predicable network performance.
Probably for your situation, you will want to consider setting up a VPN over the public Internet. Depending on your requirements I would recommend installing Windows Server on both ends linked via a VPN. This will provide you with an easy to maintain system provided you have Windows networking skills available.
Another good option is OpenSwan installed on two Linux system. OpenSwan provides the VPN and routing between networks.
Setup times for Windows or Linux (OpenSwan) is easy. You could configure everything in a day or two.
Both Windows and OpenSwan support a hub architecture. One system in your VPC and one system in each of your data centers.
Depending on the routers installed in each data center, you may be able to use AWS Virtual Private Gateways. The routers are setup in each data center with connection information and then you connect the virtual private gateways to the routers. This is actually a very good setup if you have the correct hardware installed in your data centers (e.g. a router that Amazon supports, which is quite a few).
Note: You probably cannot use a VPN client as the client will not route two networks together, just a single system to a network.
You will probably need to setup a DNS Forwarder in your VPC to communicate back to your private DNS servers.
Maybe sshuttle can do, what you need. Technically you can open ssh tunnel between your EC2 and remote ssh host. It can also deal with resolving dns requests at remote side. That is not perfect solution, since typical VPN has fail over, but you can use it as starting point. Later, maybe as foll back, or for testing purposes.
Related
AWS and network noob. I've been asked to migrate QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise to AWS. This seems easy in principle but I'm finding a lot of conflicting and confusing information on how best to do it. The requirements are:
Setup a Windows Server using AWS EC2
QuickBooks will be installed on the server, including a file share that users will map to.
Configure VPN connectivity so that the EC2 instance appears and behaves as if it were on prem.
Allow additional off site VPN connectivity as needed for ad hoc remote access
Cost is a major consideration, which is why I am doing this instead of getting someone who knows this stuff.
The on-prem network is very small - one Win2008R2 server (I know...) that hosts QB now and acts as a file server, 10-15 PCs/printers and a Netgear Nighthawk router with a static IP.
My approach was to first create a new VPC with a private subnet that will contain the EC2 instance and setup a site-to-site VPN connection with the Nighthawk for the on-prem users. I'm unclear as to if I also need to create security group rules to only allow inbound traffic (UDP,TCP file sharing ports) from the static IP or if the VPN negates that need.
I'm trying to test this one step at a time and have an instance setup now. I am remote and am using my current IP address in the security group rules for the test (no VPN yet). I setup the file share but I am unable to access it from my computer. I can RDP and ping it and have turned on the firewall rules to allow NB and SMB but still nothing. I just read another thread that says I need to setup a storage gateway but before I do that, I wanted to see if that is really required or if there's another/better approach. I have to believe this is a common requirement but I seem to be missing something.
This is a bad approach for QuickBooks. Intuit explicitly recommends against using QuickBooks with a file share via VPN:
Networks that are NOT recommended
Virtual Private Network (VPN) Connects computers over long distances via the Internet using an encrypted tunnel.
From here: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/configure-for-multiple-users/recommended-networks-for-quickbooks/00/203276
The correct approach here is to host QuickBooks on the EC2 instance, and let people RDP (remote desktop) into the EC2 Windows server to use QuickBooks. Do not let them install QuickBooks on their client machines and access the QuickBooks data file over the VPN link. Make them RDP directly to the QuickBooks server and access it from there.
I want to run a dpdk experiment using Amazon EC2 service. But there are a great number of services in AWS. I don't know which one to choose.
My experiment need two servers connected together using 10Gbps network adpater supporting dpdk. I run pktgen-dpdk on one server to send packets towards the other server. And another dpdk application will run in the other server to deal with these packets.
I think I can rent servers such c4.8xlarge c4.4xlarge. But I don't know how to set up the local network between them. The local network should have low latency.
Any suggestions will be appreciated! Thank you!
You're looking for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). An AWS EC2 "instance" like your c4.8xlarge is just a machine. The VPC and several other components allow you to set up a broader network, routing, security groups (basically, a firewall) and other networking capabilities, including in your case a Gateway, which would allow your dpkg system to look out onto the Internet to find dependencies.
The in-network latency is extremely low, < 1ms in our experience. I think most current EC2 instances support 10Gbps networking and other speedy network capabilities.
I am setting up a Tomcat application in EC2. For reliability, I am running two or more instances. If one server goes down, my users should be redirected to the other instance. This suggests that session state should be kept in an external source, or mirrored between the servers.
AWS offers a hosted service, Elasticache, which seems like it would work well. I even found a nice library, memcached-session-manager. However, I soon ran into some issues.
Unless someone can convince me otherwise, I need the session states to be encrypted in transit. Otherwise someone could intercept the network traffic and pretend to be someone else on my site. I don't see any built-in Amazon method to keep traffic off the internet. (Is peering available here?)
The library mentioned earlier does have Redis support with SSL, but it does not support a Redis cluster. Someone put in a pull request for this but it has not been incorporated and this library is a complex build. I may talk myself into living without the cluster, but that puts us back at a single point of failure.
Tomcat is running on EC2 in your VPC, and ElastiCache is in your VPC. Your AWS VPC is an isolated network. Nobody can intercept the traffic between the EC2 and Elasticache servers unless your VPC network becomes compromised in some way.
If you want to use Redis instead, with SSL connections, then I believe at this time you would need a Tomcat Session Manager implementation that uses Jedis. This one uses Jedis, but you would need to upgrade the version of Jedis it uses in order to use SSL connections.
Hi my goal is to create Active Directory in AWS. I used simple AD and used 2 public and 2 private subnets within the same VPC with the private ones being for the domain controllers. I created an EC2 instance within the same VPC with Windows Server so that I can manage the AD. My EC2 instance joins the domain with no problem. My problem however is I cannot get my local machines on my network to join the AD, as the DC's, are of course private IP's and I cant change the DNS on my machine to these IP's unless on the same network.
Im guessing I need a VPN to join my local network to the Network in the AWS cloud.
Is there a way to achieve having AD in AWS without a VPN such as using an elastic IP with NAT to communicate to the DC's? Or maybe even promoting my EC2 instance to a DC then connecting the local machines DNS to the EC2 instances elastic IP?
Any help is much appreciated and let me know if I am missing any information or not explaining the goal clear enough.
Your question mentions Simple AD. My comments will be for Active Directory in AWS.
Setting up Active Directory in AWS and on-premises is not as easy as I would like it to be. This topic can fill a small book or as Amazon does it, multiple hour long videos. Watch a few while thinking up your solution.
1) Simple AD is not real Active Directory. It is Samba 4, which is very good, but is an Active Directory clone.
2) Do not, and I repeat do not, think about putting Active Directory on a public IP address to serve your on-premises users. The number of ports that you need to open and the risk is just not worth it.
3) Most, if not all, real solutions for configuring Active Directory on-premises and in AWS involve VPNs. Either Direct Connect (DX), hardware routers (Cisco) or site to site VPNs built from OpenSwan or Windows Server.
Note: OpenSwan is very easy to setup, so this is the route I would recommend if cost is a factor. Otherwise look at Cisco ASA type routers (lots of vendors here) for your office and setup a VPN with IPSEC. If cost is not a factor, absolutely go with Direct Connect (DX).
Note: I also use OpenVPN to connect to AD in AWS from home. This setup routes my workstation to a VPC in AWS and is so easy to setup and use. You could start with this to get comfortable with networking to a VPC. There are preconfigured OpenVPN setups in AWS marketplace that are free (user limited).
I have a single Windows Amazon EC2 instance and one public IP. The instance is running multiple web server EXEs which all sit on port 80. I want to have different domain names which I want to point to each server. On my old dedicated server I achieved this simply by having different public IPs, but with Amazon EC2 I want to keep to just one public IP.
I am not using IIS, Apache, etc. otherwise life would be a lot simpler (I would simply bind hostnames accordingly). The web server executables perform unusual "utility" tasks as part of a range of other websites, but still need to be hosted on port 80. There is no configuration other than address to bind to and port #.
I have setup several private IPs and bound each server application to those private IPs. Is it possible to leverage some of the Amazon networking products to direct the traffic to the correct private IP? e.g. I have tried setting up a private-DNS using Amazon Route53, and internally at least this seems to point to the correct servers - but not (perhaps logically) when I try to access the site externally.
In absence of any other solutions I decided to solve this using the blunt hammer approach and use a reverse proxy. Downside is my servers now only see the user IPs as 127.0.0.1 which was less than ideal, but better than nothing at all.
For my reverse proxy I used Redbird (uses node.js) but Nginx may also be an option. Both are free / open source.