issues connecting to AWS production database - mysql

Question

I've been working in a local and staging database (hosted on AWS) for this app I'm working on with no issues viewing and seeding data in both environments. However, when I try connecting to the production environment to either view or seed data, I get the following error:
mysqli_real_connect(): (HY000/2002): A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
I've double checked that the credentials I used matches the credentials of the production environment and I retyped out the credentials also to ensure no whitespace characters accidentally got copied over.
I thought maybe I was having an issue with the administrative tool so I switched from phpMyAdmin to DBeaver which also didn't seem to work.
Disabling my firewall also didn't help out.
After some research online I followed this guide to authorize RDP traffic to my computer's public IPv4 address, but after following these steps I still get the above error.
my phpMyAdmin config file looks like this
/*
* Production Server
*/
$i++;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'host';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'user';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'password';
/*
* End of servers configuration
*/
?>
Using XAMPP v3.2.3 with server version MySQL 5.7.26-log and the platform runs on AWS is PHP 7.2 running on 64bit Amazon Linux/2.8.12
I'm using a Windows 10 machine and I wanted to note that my coworkers are on a Mac and had no issues connecting to the AWS instance in a remote location from me. Neither coworkers added their IPv4 to the security group.
Can anyone point me to the right direction of where the problem could be occurring? I'm stumped on this one...

Answer 1

RDP and RDS are completely different. RDP is remote desktop protocol and is therefore a method to log onto a Windows machine. RDS is AWSes managed Database service which allow you to connect to a database flavour (in this case I expect you've chosen MySQL).
If you want to connect from your local PC to RDS then ensure that you've enabled traffic from your public IP via tcp/3306 in the security group that RDS is using.
If you want to connect from RDS to your own local MySQL instance then you'll probably need to set up a NAT on your local router which maps from it's public ip and tcp/3306 to the appropriate private ip and tcp/3306 but if you do that it's really important to ensure you restrict incoming traffic from the appropriate source IP only.
By the way, is it possible that the person on a Mac is tunnelling through an SSH session to get to the database?