I have a set-up running on Amazon cloud with a couple of EC2 Instances running through a load balancer.
It is important that the site has a unique(static) IP or set of IPs as I'm plugging in 3rd party APIs which only accept requests made from IPs which have been added to their whitelist.
So basically unless we can give these 3rd parties a static IP or range of IPs that the requests from the site will always come from then we would be unable to make any calls to them.
Anyone knows how to achieve this as I know that Elastic IPs are not compatible with load balancers?
If I were to look up the IP of the load balancer DNS name (e.g. dualstack.awseb-BAMobile-ENV-xxxxxxxxx.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com resolves to 200.200.200.200) would that IP be Static?
Any help/advise is greatly appreciated guys.
The ip addresses of your load balancer is not static. In any event, your incoming load balancer IP wouldn't be used for outgoing connections.
You could assign elastic IPs to the actual instances behind the load balancer, which would then be used for outgoing requests. You get 5 free elastic ips, and I believe you can apply for more if you need them.
Additionally if using a VPC and if your instances are in a private subnet then they will only be able to access the internet via the NAT instance(s) you setup, and you can of course assign an elastic IP to the NAT instances
This is an old question, but things have changed now.
Now you can create a Network ELB to get a LB with a static IP.
from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/network/introduction.html
Support for static IP addresses for the load balancer. You can also
assign one Elastic IP address per subnet enabled for the load
balancer.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-network-load-balancer-effortless-scaling-to-millions-of-requests-per-second/
You can attache an additional ENI (Elastic Network Interface) to an instance in your VPC. This way the ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) routes the incoming Internet requests to the web server, and the additional ENI will be used to connect to your 3rd party (or internal) requests (Management network)
You can see more details about it in the VPC documentations
Really the only way I am aware of doing this is by setting up your instances within a VPC and having dedicated NAT instances by which all outbound traffic is routed.
Here is a link to the AWS documentation on how to set up NAT instances:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_NAT_Instance.html
You CAN attach an elastic IP to the instances BUT NOT to the ELB (which is what the client sees).
You could use a full reverse proxy layer 7 load balancer like HAProxy:
Or a commercial implementation like Loadbalancer.org or Riverbed (Zeus)
They both are in the AWS Marketplace:
Your outbound requests to your 3rd party APIs will NOT go out via the ELB/ALB. That's for incoming connections. If you need an inbound static IP you'll probably need to forego the loadbalancer (or figure out how to implement Anshu's suggestion to attach an elastic IP to the loadbalancers, the doc is light on details). Update: I found some documentation that ALB use static addresses (and I just tried binding an elastic IP to one to be sure and that failed).
If you're talking about outbound connections see below:
If your server is deployed in a public subnet you can attach an
elastic IP to that host. Outbound communications will go out over
that address.
If your server is deployed in a private subnet there's
a NAT gateway attached to it. All outbound traffic from your private
subnet will go out over that interface.
You could use as already mentioned loadbalancer.org appliance in AWS. It would replace the AWS NAT instance and give greater functionality and include both Layer4 and Layer7, along with SSL termination and a WAF.
Best of all you get free support in your 30 day trial in AWS to help you get up and running.
Yes I am biased as I work for loadbalancer.org however I would say nothing ventured nothing gained.
You can use a DNS service like DNSMadeeasy that allows "ANAME" records. These act like an A Record but can be pointed at a FQDN or IP. So in this case you can point it to the ELB DNS.
Dave
Related
so currently in our infrastructure we are using ECS with an application load balancer for inbound traffic and a NAT gateway for outbound traffic. I am looking to configure both inbound and outbound traffic to have the same public IP address but I am not sure how this is done as I've tried may different ways to achieve this but nothing seemed to have worked. If we take a look at the below image our infrastructure is similar except that we us EC2 and not fargate as we prefer to maintain our own instances
Screen shot
I would be very thankful if anyone could please help me out with this
I don’t think this is possible. External traffic is always routed though a NAT gateway, and incoming either though unknown number of ever changing load balancers or directly to IP of the e.g. EC2 instance.
I have ECS service running in AWS and I am going to create application load balancer for this service. I have read through this doc: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/service-load-balancing.html but what I don't quite understand is how I can specify an entry endpoint IP address to my load balancer. This IP address will be used by client to send requests to my service. Based on my understanding, the IP should be configured in load balancer not my ECS service's task.
Using an IP address for connecting to an elastic load balancer is a bad idea. ELBs are elastic, which means there are multiple instances behind a single load balancer for fault tolerance. That's the reason AWS recommends to use the Hostname instead of IP address.
If you still want to test the connetivity using load balancer IP address, you can try the nslookup command
nslookup yourELBPublicDNS
This will give you multiple addresses back, you can try to hit one. But keep in mind that those IP addresses may change. The reason is simple, if the underlying host for the load balancer fails, it will be replaced by a new one, which most likely will have new IP. But what remains constant is the domain name, so using the hostname is recommended.
As mentioned in the answer IP is bad idea but not if its static IP. As NLB support static IP while application LB does not support static IP.
If you are looking for static IP, then you need to place network LB in the top of application LB, application LB will communicate with backend ECS services while the NLB will be for the client. The client will able to communicate using the static IP of NLB that will not change.
Against each availability zone, you have static IP for NLB, you can check further integration here.
If you are looking for allowing specific IP to use your Endpoint then you need AWS application firewall.
I have a load balancer configured to have an IPV4 Ip address. However, the provided IP is a DNS mapped IP address to the load balancer of the format *.ap-south-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
I need to configure IOT devices to send data to the load balancer and they do not support DNS. How can I assign a static IP address like ... to my load balancer so that I can configure my IOT devices to send data to it.
The Elastic IPs section does not provide a facility to allocate it to a load balancer and only supports ec2 instances.
Conclusion:
I have found a way to use DNS on my IOT device and working on this was vital. I am now aware of the option of manually hosting a load-balancer on an EC2 instance. A simper alternative is forwarding all requests at an elastic IP addressed EC2 instance to the load balancer. However, this will cause a bottleneck at the transparent proxy. Hence, I think using the DNS feature on the IOT device is the best option.
Elastic Load Balancers do not support static IP addresses. They only support DNS CNAMEs (or Aliases if you are using Route 53). This is because ELB DNS entries will resolve to different IP addresses depending on how it is scaling between availability zones. Also, over time, the IP addresses will/may change.
The AWS documentation also specifically states to create CNAME-records only when mapping custom DNS entries to your ELB. If you are using Route 53, you can create an Alias record, which look like an A-record to the outside world.
If you need a static IP address, then you cannot use ELB.
Instead, you will need to manage your own load balancer (HAProxy, nginx, etc.) on an EC2 instance using an Elastic IP address.
It would not be possible to assign a static IP with the elastic load balancer. You need to use DNS name only.
The only way I am aware of doing this is by setting up your instances within a VPC and having dedicated NAT instances by which all outbound traffic is routed.
Here is a link to the AWS documentation on how to set up NAT instances:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_NAT_Instance.html
AWS Elastic Load Balancer does not support assigning a static IP address due to many reasons.
Looking at your problem, the issue you are facing is having large amount of data sources to pump data to AWS. I suggest you to use AWS Kinesis Firehose service instead of the current approach as Firehose specifically focus on streaming data into AWS.
How can I assign a static IP address to a ELB. Seems like I cannot.
Some articles online asks to create a Route 53 record but this requires changing CNAME of domain which also redirect email traffic. I just want to change A record not CNAME.
Some articles also mention that I can use a EC2 instance as a reverse proxy. But will a single proxy be able to handle a lot of traffic?
Any solution for this?
AWS' Elastic Load Balancer is actually elastic on two levels as described here:
http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/07/elastic-in-elastic-load-balancing-elb.html
The first level is the load balancer itself. In order to make sure that ELB can scale to whatever volume you have and burst to whatever volume you suddenly encounter, AWS assigns a 'static' DNS hostname (e.g. MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com). That hostname points to multiple IP addresses. You can see that (from a command line) by running
$ host MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com
MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com 172.31.7.2
MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com 172.31.11.33
The second form of elasticity within the ELB is obviously then ELB directing the query to one of your EC2 instances in the pool.
So, you can see that trying to assign a static IP address to the load balancer would be self-defeating.
Using an EC2 instance as a reverse proxy would also seem self-defeating as you would then create a bottleneck before even getting to the ELB. Might as well just create your own load balancer.
The recommended solution (which you've pointed out) is to create a CNAME that points to the ELB hostname (which won't change).
i.e. my-app.mycompany.com ->
MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com
This would allow you to integrate your scalable application, behind the ELB within your domain.
I'm not sure I fully understand why you cannot create a CNAME in your DNS or what that has to do with directing email traffic, can you explain?
A new feature in AWS (I believe it was announced at Re:Invent 2017) allows for static IPs with Network Load Balancers (NLB). NLB can only handle layer 4 (TCP) and not HTTP specifics (layer 7).
You can assign one Elastic IP address per availability zone.
For details see the AWS blog post or the NLB documentation.
The "Classic Load Balancer" and "Application Load Balancer" do not support static IPs. If you need a feature only provided by those, you have to fall back to the CNAME solution described above.
A blog was recently published by AWS support on this topic leveraging NLB to provide static IP to Classic and Application load balancer - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/using-static-ip-addresses-for-application-load-balancers/
Summary of solution as described by the post
We end up with a TCP listener on a NLB that accepts traffic and forwards it to an internal ALB. The ALB terminates TLS, examines HTTP headers, and routes requests based on your configured rules to target groups with your instances, servers, or containers. The AWS Lambda function keeps everything in sync by watching the ALB for IP address changes and updating the NLB target group. In the end we’ll have a few static IP addresses that are easy for whitelisting, and we won’t lose any of the benefits of ALB. Note that we will be sending all of the traffic through two load balancers
I found setting up AWS Global Accelerator very straight forward and simple. It created 2 static IP Addresses and a static DNS pointing to my Application load balancer.
Configuring Global Accelerator
Set listeners as TCP port 80, 443
Select your load balancer endpoint (AWS Global Accelerator Configuration)
Add cname record for your dns pointing to the static dns it created
(mywebsite.com > globalacceleratorDNS.com). If any client needs to
whitelist, give them the 2 static IP it created
Pricing is $18 per month + a few pennies per GB of data transfer.
I'm pretty sure its cheaper than the NLB, Nat Gateway, Elastic IP setup.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/about-accelerators.html
For little traffic, it might be a solution to set up an EC2 Instance running Nginx as a forwarding proxy.
So you can use the EC2's static IP Address to forward your traffic resolving the ALB's DNS name.
However, it's a kind of a hack, but using a Global Accelerator or an NLB seems to me also like a hack :-)
Unlike the Network Load Balancer, the Application Load Balancer (ALB) does not support Elastic IPs, but that's not the worst part. If you use Route 53 together with the ALB, the DNS automatically sets the TTL to 60 seconds. This appears to be causing problems for our institutional - mainly government - customers running older Windows DNS servers. They just can't keep up with the ALB's Listener changing its public-facing IP on such a short notice. Older DNS infrastructure is either not respecting or is not capable of handling such aggressive TTL.
While I don't like it, AWS recommends to put a Network Load Balancer in front of the Application Load Balancer, per here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/using-static-ip-addresses-for-application-load-balancers/
I need the static IP to allow access to a firewalled network not on the AWS network.
Is it possible to get a static IP for a load balanced app using Elastic Beanstalk? I'm following the AWS docs regarding using Route 53 to host my app with a domain name, but from what I've read, this does not ensure a static IP because it is essentially using a CNAME allowing the IP behind the scenes to change. Is that the right understanding? Is it possible at all?
This post helped me get a static IP for outgoing requests by using a NAT Gateway, and routing specific requests through it.
I needed this static IP in order to be whitelisted from an external API provider.
I found this way much easier than the provided by AWS, without the need of creating a new VPC and a private and public subnets.
Basically, what I did was:
Create a new subnet to host the NAT Gateway.
Create the NAT Gateway in the above subnet, and assign a new Elastic IP. This one will be our outgoing IP for hitting external APIs.
Create a route table for the NAT subnet. All outbound traffic (0.0.0.0/0) should be routed through the NAT Gateway. Assign the created subnet to use the new route table.
Modify the main route table (the one that handles all our EC2 instances requests), and add the IP(s) of the external API, setting its target to the NAT Gateway.
This way we can route any request to the external API IPs through the NAT Gateway. All other requests are routed through the default Internet Gateway.
As the posts says, this is not a Multi AZ solution, so if the AZ that holds our NAT Gateway fails, we may lose connection to the external API.
Update:
See #TimObezuk comment to make this a Multi-AZ solution.
Deploy your beanstalk environment in VPC, and with the right configuration, a static IP for outbound traffic is easy.
In this setup, your instances all relay their outbound traffic through a single machine, which you can assign an elastic IP address to. All of the inside-originated, Internet-bound traffic from all of the instances behind it will appear, from the other network, to bw using that single elastic IP.
The RDS portion of the following may be irrelevant to your needs but the principles are all the same.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/AWSHowTo-vpc-rds.html
Deploy your beanstalk environment in VPC, and with the right configuration, a static IP for outbound traffic is easy.
In this setup, your instances all relay their outbound traffic through a single machine, which you can assign an elastic IP address to. All of the inside-originated, Internet-bound traffic from all of the instances behind it will appear, from the other network, to bw using that single elastic IP.
The RDS portion of the following may be irrelevant to your needs but the principles are all the same.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/AWSHowTo-vpc-rds.html