Good Day,
I have been using AWS quite a bit for my cloud based system for a hardware project. Using SimpleDB and the notification service provided is great.
However, I need a backend on AWS that basically listens to requests coming in, processes it and sends it back to a particular address. Some kind of UDP service.
I could easily write a c#/c++ app for it, but i am not sure if I can host it on AWS. Does anyone know how this works?
Short answer: yes.
EC2 instances are just like any other virtual machine, obviously you can put in a server that listens to UDP. Configuring the network for this is, of course, slightly more complicated, but possible. The one thing making it more complicated is that with UDP you will not be able to enjoy the load balancer service that Amazon offers, as it (currently) only supports TCP-based protocols.
So, if you have one server you wish to put on the internet, the procedure is probably same as what you'd do with a TCP server: set up a server and an elastic IP pointing to it, and then have your clients connect to it (by knowing the elastic IP you've been allocated, or by referring to that IP via a DNS resolution). If you have multiple servers you wish to set up, answering the same address, life is a bit more complicated. With TCP, you could have set up an Amazon load balancer and assign your elastic IP to the load balancer. If you'd want a load balancer for UDP, the Amazon stock load balancer can't do that, but you can still find a software load balancer (there are hundreds of them on Amazon's public images library) to set up.
Nginix has an Amazon image that will load balance UDP for $2,500/yr or you can launch your own EC2 instance and use open source Nginx.
My specific use case was for a UDP logging service, if you can use hostnames Route 53 could be a scalable managed solution as well.
Related
What I am trying to achieve:
sftp server.greedyguides.com
I basically want to connect a subdomain, to a load balancer that listens to port 22. I know i can ssh/sftp using the ip, but I also wanted to set up a domain version of that.
PS: I have never really asked questions on here, so sorry if format is bad.
SFTP would not be an appropriate protocol to serve via a Load Balancer.
The concept of a Load Balancer is that requests are spread across targets (typically Amazon EC2 instances). Using HTTP as an example, a person might request a page and Server 1 returns the response. When they click a link and request another page, it might be served from Server 2.
However, SFTP wouldn't be happy being served by multiple computers. One computer might provide a list of available files, but when the user requests a file such a request might go to a different computer that does not have the same set of files. SFTP has not been designed as a horizontally scalable system.
From a technical perspective, an Application Load Balancer will only work with web (HTTP) requests. A Network Load Balancer might be able to serve SFTP traffic because it does not modify the content of the requests being passed to the targets.
If you wish to provide an SFTP service to your users, I would recommend AWS Transfer for SFTP:
AWS Transfer for SFTP (AWS SFTP) is a fully managed AWS service that enables you to transfer files over Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), into and out of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage. SFTP is also known as Secure Shell (SSH) File Transfer Protocol. SFTP is used in data exchange workflows across different industries such as financial services, healthcare, advertising, and retail, among others.
As a managed service, AWS takes care of scaling the system, so you don't need to load balance or manage the SFTP servers.
This is nothing different from using NLB for any other purpose
There is a valid use case to use NLB for sftp servers when these servers are synchronized with NAS or EFS
and clients upload files to them via sftp servers
So in that case all you do is create a TCP listener on NLB port 22 and have forwarding rules for however many sftp servers you have that have NAS or EFS mounted
Think about Microservices uploading files to EFS via sftp servers using key-pair methodology for authentication for a better security (user id password security isn’t strong)
Also, you don’t want all the load going to one sftp server
I have a secure web API in the AWS cloud and I'm trying to figure out the best way to put it behind a load balancer without compromising security.
Right now, all communications are conventionally encrypted end-to-end. The API server has a Let's Encrypt certificate, which is used to treat all messages exchanged with clients. Unless the encryption is broken, nobody besides the server and its clients can view the raw contents of messages.
If I start using a load balancer and allow multiple instances of my server to run concurrently, I'll have to give up on LE and use centralized certificate management (e.g. ACM). AWS conveniently supports linking ACM-generated certificates to load balancer HTTPS listeners. This is especially useful for automatic renewal. However, the load balancer would then remove the encryption layer, and all communications with the instances of my server would be decrypted from that point on.
I'm not too comfortable having my raw data traveling in a public cloud. Still, I'd welcome a second opinion on this.
My question therefore is: Is it considered secure to have load balancer strip HTTPS encryption layer and forward all traffic as HTTP to internal server instances?
Since I can guess the answer, I would appreciate any suggestions on how to deploy load balancing securely.
I consider it secure because each AWS VPC is isolated from another.
The traffic of one VPC cannot be captured in another VPC. Of course whether AWS VPC technology is secure remains to be seen as others have said.
Also check out the documentation from EBS about secure end-to-end encryption. It says that:
Terminating secure connections at the load balancer and using HTTP on the backend may be sufficient for your application. Network traffic between AWS resources cannot be listened to by instances that are not part of the connection, even if they are running under the same account.
I have a small nodejs application containing a web socket server.
The app is hosted inside an ecs container so it is basically a docker image running on an ec2 instance.
The web socket works as expected over ws://. I use port 5000 for this.
In order to use it on my SSL secured website (https), i need to use a secured web socket connection over wss://.
To archive that I've created a certificate on aws (like many times before) and after I create a load balancer.
I tried an application load balancer, a network load balancer and the classic load balancer (previous generation).
I read a few answers here on StackOverflow and followed the instructions as well as some tutorials found using google.
I tried a lot without success. Of course, this takes a lot of time because the creation of a load balancer and other resources takes quite a bit of time.
How I create a load balancer on aws pointing to my instance with wss://. Could someone please provide an example or instructions?
The solution posted
https://anandhub.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/websocket-ebs/ appears to work well.
Rather than selecting https and http, select the 'SSL' on port 443 and 'TCP' on your applications port (eg 5000)
You'll need to load your key/certificate via AWS and the loadbalancer will handle the secure part. I suspect you can not take advantage of 'sticky' features of the LB with this method.
Tonight, my client is going to be on a high-profile television show to pitch his business. I created their API and had it running on a small server on Google Cloud Platform with a static IP on the instance since that was all that we needed.
Now I am trying to scale it for the inevitable traffic, I'm moving to a load balancer and multiple, scalable instances. I thought I could use the IP address from the instance and transfer it to the load balancer. But the load balancer requires a global forwarding IP, and the IP address of the instance is only regional.
For some reason, the mobile developers hardcoded their URLs to the IP address and not the domain name. It's too late in the day for them to resubmit the app code, so I need a way to forward the regional IP to the global forwarding IP that the load balancer takes.
Could I do this through Google Cloud Platform? Or should I set this up through the domain name provider?
I realize that this may break some rules on SO, but I only need the answer for today, the question can come down tomorrow if it does break rules.
Your best shot today may be to increase the memory/cpu of the current machine type and/or use something like Nginx to proxy requests from the instance to the load balanced fleet.
It is possible to use nginx as a very efficient HTTP load balancer to
distribute traffic to several application servers and to improve
performance, scalability and reliability of web applications with
nginx.
I would do both: increase instance capacity and try an Nginx proxy on that instance. You will still have a single point of failure, but would be able to handle greater capacity.
Essentially this configuration will forward requests from the instance (the regional ip) to your GCP load balancer (the global ip)
We are using Amazon EC2 services to host our play application on live. I have a quite important problem with Elastic Load Balancer. In my application I need request remote address and I am using play framework controller's request.remoteAddress property for it. However on Amazon it is stored always as load balancers ip address which is misleading us as we cannot track request remote address.
Is there something like a setting in Amazon ELB Configuration for forwarded requests? In Apache i think there is a solution for that but I have skimmed through ELB documentation and could not find any clue.
i think you can use this when you a behind an proxy or load balancer:
String ip = Http.Request.current().headers.get("x-forwarded-for")
I think I found an elegant solution that Play Framework have a support such as XForwardedSupport. I am planning to test it in a short while.
Details of XForwardedSupport is here