Amazon Elastic Beanstalk internal and internet access - amazon-web-services

We’re trying to create a setup of multiple APIs via the Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk (AEB) component. The reason we have chosen AEB is because it provides seamless deployment and scaling for the applications we deploy, without the need to manually create Load Balancers (LB) and scaling rules. We would very much like to keep it this way as we are planning on launching a (large) number of applications and APIs.
However, we’re facing a number of challenges with AEB.
First and foremost, some of the API’s need to communicate internally, and low latency is a core requirement for us. In order to utilize internal network communication in AEB we have been “forced” to:
Allocate a VPC in Amazon
Deploy each application to this VPC - each behind their own internal LB
Now, when using the Elastic beanstalk URLs the APIs are able to resolve the internal IP of the LB of another API and thus the latency is eliminated and all is good - the APIs can communicate with one another.
However, this spawns another issue for us:
Some of these “internally” allocated APIs (remember, they’re behind an internal LB in a VPC) must also be accessible from the internet.
We still haven’t found a way to make the internal LBs internet accessible (while keeping their ability to also act as internal LB), so any help on this matter is greatly appreciated.

Each application should be on a subnet within VPC
Update ACL and ELB Security Group to let external access
AWS Elastic Load Balancing Inside of a Virtual Private Cloud
Also, this question on SO contains relevant information: Amazon ELB in VPC

Related

Firewall issue - egress from GKE to Cloud Function HTTP Trigger

I am developing a solution where a Java application hosted on GKE wants to make an outbound HTTP call to a cloud function which is deployed under a different GCP project, where the GKE operates on a shared network of which possesses firewall rules for the CIDR ranges in that shared network.
For example - GKE cluster & Application deployed under GCP Project A, wishes to invoke a Serverless GCP Function deployed to project B.
There are a number of firewall rules configured on the shared network of which the GKE is operating upon, causing my HTTP call to time out, as the HTTP trigger URL is not mapped to an allowed CIDR range (in that shared network).
What have I tried?
I have lightly investigated one or two solutions which make use of Cloud NAT & Router to proxy the HTTP call to the Cloud Function trigger endpoint, but I am wondering if there are any other, simpler suggestions? The address range for cloud functions is massive so allowing that range is out of the question.
I was thinking about maybe deploying the cloud function into the same VPC & applying ingress restrictions to it, would that allow the HTTP trigger to exist in the allowed IP range?
Thanks in advance
Serverless VPC Access is a GCP solution specially designed to achieve what you want. The communication between the serverless environment and the VPC is done through an internal IP address, and therefore never exposed to the Internet.
For your specific infrastructure, you would need to follow the guide Connecting to a Shared VPC network.

Do I need a loadbalancer in an AWS elastic beanstak environment

My applications run on ElasticBeanstalk and communicate purely with internal services like Kinesis and DynamoDB. There is no web traffic needed? Do I need an ElasticLoadBalancer in order to scale my instances up and down. I want to add and remove instances purely based on some cloudwatch metrics? Do I need the ELB to do managed updates etc.?
If there is no traffic to the service then there is no need to have a load balancer.
In fact the load balancer is primarily to distribute inbound traffic such as web requests.
Autoscaling can still be accomplished without a load balancer with scaling based on the CloudWatch metric that you want to use. In fact this is generally how consumer based applications tend to work.
To create this without a load balancer you would want to configure you environment as a worker environment.
#Chris already anwsered, but I would like to complement his answer for the following:
There is no web traffic needed?
Even if you communicate with Kinesis and DynamoDB only, your instances still need to be able to access internet to communicate with the AWS services. So the web traffic is required from your instances. The direct inbound traffic to your instances is not needed.
To fully separate your EB env from the internet you should have a look at the following:
Using Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon VPC
The document describes what you can do and want can't be done when using private subnets.

What does mid-tier load balancing mean?

I was going through the article https://github.com/Netflix/eureka/wiki/Eureka-at-a-glance#how-different-is-eureka-from-aws-elb about Eureka when I came across this term. Also quite confused what the paragraph means (EC2 classic and AWS security groups). It said
AWS Elastic Load Balancer is a load balancing solution for edge services exposed to end-user web traffic. Eureka fills the need for mid-tier load balancing. While you can theoretically put your mid-tier services behind the AWS ELB, in EC2 classic you expose them to the outside world and thereby losing all the usefulness of the AWS security groups.
I'm completely new to Microservice architecture and reading articles from sources I can find. Any help would be helpful!
A mid-tier load balancer is a load balancer that isn't exposed to the Internet, but instead is intended to distribute internally-generated traffic between components in your stack.
An example would be the "order placement" (micro)service verifying prices by sending requests to the "catalog item details" (micro)service -- you need a mid-tier load balancer in front of the multiple nodes providing the "catalog item details" service so that the request is routed to a healthy endpoint for that service, without "order placement" needing to be responsible for somehow finding a healthy "catalog item details" endpoint on its own.
Eureka was first committed to Github in 2012. Back then, much of EC2 was still running inside "EC2 Classic" -- in simple terms, this is the old way EC2 worked, before VPC. It was a much more primitive environment compared to today.
With EC2-Classic, your instances run in a single, flat network that you share with other customers. With Amazon VPC, your instances run in a virtual private cloud (VPC) that's logically isolated to your AWS account.
The EC2-Classic platform was introduced in the original release of Amazon EC2. If you created your AWS account after 2013-12-04, it does not support EC2-Classic, so you must launch your Amazon EC2 instances in a VPC.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-classic-platform.html
EC2 Classic supported security groups for securing access to EC2 instances, but Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) inside EC2 Classic did not.
VPC became generally available in August, 2011.
Elastic Load Balancer -- originally the only type, this type was later rebranded as "ELB Classic," and is not recommended for new environments -- was released for VPC in November, 2011 but only in the Internet-facing variety. Before this, as noted above, ELB only worked in EC2 Classic, only faced the Internet, and accepted HTTP and HTTPS traffic from everywhere. You couldn't control access with security groups.
ELB Classic learned a new trick in June 2012, with the release of Internal Elastic Load Balancers -- accessible only from services inside the VPC. These could be used securely for mid-tier, but they were very limited because they could not make routing decisions based on hostname or path. ELB Classic was a very barebones load balancer with very little flexibility. You'd essentially need a different balancer for each service. One commom configuration was to use HAProxy behind ELB Classic to fill in some of the feature gaps.
AWS didn't have a solid, managed, mid-tier load balancer offering until August, 2016, when the new Application Load Balancer was announced -- with the ability to send traffic to different backend target groups based on pattern matching in the request path sent to the balancer... and with support for deploying in an Internet-facing or internal-only scheme.
In April, 2017, Application Load Balancers were enhanced with the ability to also select a back-end target group based on pattern-matching the HTTP Host header and/or the path, as before.
At this point, VPC and ALB fill many (but, in some cases, not all) of the needs that seem to have driven the development of Eureka.
I would assume that this middle tier is something that can act as a barrier or protection against your AWS ELB. Let use examples of people trying to do an SQL injection attack or spamming your AWS ELB. Also, SG in AWS allows you to specify what protocols are coming to the ALB or any other resources in AWS when you create them. So for example, you can set up an SG that only accepts traffic from your middle-tier server as an additional level of security.
Hope this helps with a better understanding.

cross-region k8s inter-cluster communication in GCP

I am looking for a way to access services/applications in a remote k8s cluster(C2) hosted in a different region(R2) from a client application in my current cluster(C1 in region R1).
Server application needs to load-balanced(fqdn preferred over IP)
Communication is through private network, no internet
I tried using an internal-LB for C2 which doesn't work and later realized it to be a regional product.
Moreover, it seems, the same constraint is true for vpc peering also.
Please suggest how to achieve this.
You can't use any internal GCP LB on a regional level. However, you may be able to use an Nginx internal ingress as it may not be limited to the same region.
Otherwise you can use Creating VPC-native clusters using Alias IPs which can allow you to call on pods directly. It will not offer built in load balancing but it is an alternative.
Finally, if you need to use the internal load balancers, you can create a VPN tunnel between the two regions and create a route that forces traffic through the gateway. Traffic coming through the tunnel will be regional to the ILB, but this config is more expensive and with more moving parts, there's a higher chance of failure

Microservice security with AWS

I've got an ECS cluster where I have a couple of services running. All of them have their own load balancer so for every service I have a URL like http://my-service-1234554321.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com. But I would like to open only one service of all these (f.ex. 10) services for the whole world while all the others I would like to be hidden and have access to them only from services in this cluster via HTTP. Is it possible and how can I do that?
Elastic Load Balancers can be either be internet facing (open to traffic from the Internet) or internal facing (accepting traffic from within a VPC).
When you create the load balancer for your service, specify the scheme as internal for the services you only wish to access from within the cluster. For the service that needs to be external, set it as internet facing.
The ECS documentation talks about setting the Load Balancer scheme here.
Just remember that a load balancer cannot be both internet facing and internal at the same time. If you decide that you want to expose services that were internal over the Internet at a later date, you will probably need to create a second internet facing ELB for that.