I have an external server hosted and managed on my side. There's another server I use, which is based on Amazon EC2. I would like to get them to work together using Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud).
Is that possible? If so, how can it be done?
If you intend to migrate your EC2 instance to a VPC, then no, you can not. You will require to create a new instance inside your VPC and replicate the setup and data. The fastest way to accomplish this is creating an AMI from your current EC2 instance and deploy it as a new instance inside VPC.
Furthermore, if your VPC instance is deployed in a private subnet, you will have to deploy a public NAT instance, configure the NAT instance DST-NAT rules to map external ports to your app instance, setup the VPC routing tables properly and adjust the security groups in order to allow forwarding traffic.
Now, about the external server, if you are going to migrate it to VPC, I would recommend you to directly create a new instance with a prebuilt standard Amazon AMI and then manully replicate configuration and data. There are some VM migration tools but my experience with such tools has not been friendly so...
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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)
I made and deployed my Django application in AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It has a connection to a Postgres DB in RDS, through the EBS console.
When I click configuration -> network in EBS, I see: "This environment is not part of a VPC."
How can I make it a part of a VPC? Thanks!
NOTE: very new to this ;)
You have to recreate the Elastic Beanstalk environment and pick the VPC during the creation. It is not possible to move an existing environment into a VPC.
But, unless you have access to EC2-Classic, the EC2 servers that were launched are already be in a VPC. They are just in the default VPC. But as far as Elastic Beanstalk is concerned, it seems oblivious to this.
I am not sure if there are any features that are exclusively available to VPC environments. My suggestion is to try to use your current environment, and if you happen to recreate the environment later for some other reason, then you can try picking a VPC and see if it offers anything new.
As already explained by #stefansundin you can't move existing EB into a custom VPC. You have to create new one.
These are general steps to consider:
Create a custom VPC with public and private subnets as described in the docs: VPC with public and private subnets (NAT). NAT is needed for instances and rds in private subnet to communicate with internet, but no inbound internet traffic will be allowed. This ensures that your instances and rds are not accessible from the outside.
Create new RDS, external to EB. This is good practice as otherwise the lifetime of your RDS is coupled with EB environment. Starting point is the following AWS documentation: Launching and connecting to an external Amazon RDS instance in a default VPC
Create new EB environment and ensure to customize its settings to use the VPC. Pass the RDS endpoint to the EB instances using environmental variables. Depending on how you want to handle password to the RDS, there are few options, starting from using environmental variables (low security) through SSM Parameter Store (free) or AWS Secrets Manager (not free).
Setting this all up correctly can be difficult for someone new to AWS. But with patience and practice it can be done. Thus, I would recommend with starting with default VPC, as you have now. Then once you are comfortable with how to work with external RDS, think on creating custom VPC as described.
Before moving to Amazon Web Services, I was using Google Cloud Platform to develop my aplication, CloudSQL to be specific, and GCP have something called Cloud SQL Proxy that allows me to connect to my CloudSQL instance using my computer, instead of having to deploy my code to the server and then test it. How can I make the same thing using AWS?
I have a python environment on Elastic Beanstalk, that uses Amazon RDS.
AWS is deny be default so you cannot access an RDS instance outside of the VPC that your application is running in. With that being said... you can connect to the RDS instance via a VPN that can be stood up in EC2 that has rules open to the RDS instance. This would allow you to connect to the VPN on whatever developer machine and then access the RDS instance as if your dev box was in the VPC. This is my preferred method because it is more secure. Only those with access to the VPN have access to the RDS instance. This has worked well for me in a production sense.
The VPN provider that I use is https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/OpenVPN-Inc-OpenVPN-Access-Server/B00MI40CAE
Alternatively you could open up a hole in your VPC to the RDS instance and make it publicly available. I don't recommend this however because it will leave your RDS instance open to attack as it is publicly exposed.
You can expose your AWS RDS to the internet by proper VPC setting, I did it before.
But it has some risks
So usually you can use those ways to figure it out:
Create a local database server and restore snapshot from your AWS RDS
or use VPN to connect to your private subnet which hold your RDS
A couple people have suggested putting your RDS instance in a public subnet, and allowing access from the internet.
This is generally considered to be a bad idea, and should be the last resort.
So you have a couple of options for getting access to RDS in a private subnet.
The first option is to set up networking between your local network and your AWS VPC. You can do this with Direct Connect, or with a point-point VPN. But based on your question, this isn't something you feel comfortable with.
The second option is to set up a bastion server in the public subnet, and use ssh port forwarding to get local access to the RDS over the SSH tunnel.
You don't say if you on linux or Windows, but this can be accomplished on either OS.
What I did to solve was:
Go to Elastic Beanstalk console
Chose you aplication
Go to Configurations
Click on the endpoint of your database in Databases
Click on the identifier of your DB Instance
In security group rules click in the security groups
Click in the inbound tab
Click edit
Change type to All Traffic and source to Anywhere
Save
This way you can expose the RDS connected to your Elastic Beanstalk aplication to the internet, which is not recommended as people sugested, but it is what I was looking for.
I will be using the PythonAnywhere PaaS service. It is using AWS on us-east-1 for all its EC2 instances.
They don't offer Redis and I plan to create a regular AWS Redis instance using Elasticache.
Ideally I would like to connect to the Redis instance from the paas using local internal network of AWS.
Do you know if this kind of setup is possible? That is benefit from local network between paas AWS hosted to regular EC2 instances?
(The paas allows external connections.)
Multiple AWS VPCs can connect to each other via VPC Peering. The VPCs must be in the same region and have non-overlapping IP addresses.
However, this requires changes within both VPCs to connect to each other. It is unlikely that PythonAnywhere would want to modify their configuration for you. (But, by all means, ask them!)
An alternative is to connect to your Redis cluster within your own VPC, but do it via a Public IP address. The traffic will travel between VPCs across the 'edge' of the Internet -- that is, it won't go on the Internet proper, it will just transit within AWS' network if it is in the same Region. So, it is using the "local internal network of AWS", but via a Public IP address.
I'm following AWS's instructions Scenario 2: VPC with Public and Private Subnets and am having issues at the point I try to launch a DB server.
When I launch my instance, all is fine and I am able to assign it to my newly created VPC. However, when it comes to launch the RDS, the only VPC available (on step 4, configure advanced settings) is the default VPC (ie not the one I created as per their instructions).
Has anyone any idea about this or indeed how to resolve it?
RDS requires a little more setup than an EC2 instance if you want to launch it within a VPC.
Specifically, you need to create:
a DB subnet group within the VPC
a VPC security group for the RDS instance
The documentation is a little buried in the AWS RDS documents. It can be found here:
Creating a DB Instance in a VPC