I have a Node.JS Express API App that's hosted on Heroku in the cloud. I'd like to query a MySQL DB.
The problem is that this DB is hosted on a secure LAN with proprietary info. We don't want to expose this DB to the public. What's the desired pattern for things like this?
I have a static proxy IP that I was thinking of maybe whitelisting in MySQL Server if possible. I think introducing another layer like VPN or SSH isn't going to work.
I have a static proxy IP that I was thinking of maybe whitelisting in MySQL Server if possible
MySQL does allow whitelisting of IPs. It is possible.
However, you can create an SSH tunnel from the local system to the server. The SSH tunnel can give you an encrypted SSH connection. And instead of using an SSH based on password, the better method is to use a key based encryption
What you need to do is to generate a public authentication key and append it to the remote hosts ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. And preferably, disable password based authentication and only permit key based ssh connections.
If you need some steps on how to achieve this, I can list down too.
I have an application running on EC2 instances that store data in an RDS instance. All of these instances are in an AWS VPC with security groups configured to allow them to connect to each other.
For reporting purposes, I would like to connect to the RDS instance from my laptop (e.g. using SQLAlchemy) to run simple queries. Every time I try to connect using the connection string that the EC2 apps use, the connection times out.
For Google, one can use the Cloud SQL proxy for this, but I can't find an analogous product for AWS. Instead, it seems like what I am supposed to do is attach an internet gateway to the VPC and configure the security groups to allow connection from my machine. However, the documents are unclear on how to do this other than allowing all inbound connections or allowing a static IP. Unfortunately my laptop doesn't have a static IP, and I'm uncomfortable allowing all inbound connections as it seems insecure and an invitation to attacks. I also have not been able to find a way to configure a security group to allow connections based on IAM credentials for example using the AWS CLI. Since I will be routinely generating reports, a solution that involves updating a security group (i.e. allowing my current IP) every time I want to connect seems suboptimal.
I have tried following the following documents, but so far have had no success in finding a solution that does not allow all connections:
Allow users to connect to RDS using IAM*
Connecting to RDS instance from command line
Connecting to RDS on VPC from internet
*My RDS instance configuration does not allow me to enable IAM authentication, I'm not sure why
IAM Database Authentication is not supported for the configuration in the DB Instance db.
Modify your Db Instance to another instance class and try again.
(Service: AmazonRDS; Status Code: 400; Error Code: InvalidParameterCombination;
Request ID: a6194fb8-2ab9-4a6a-a2be-63835e6e0184)
Is there something I'm not understanding or overlooking? Is allowing connections from all IPs not a big deal since the DB instance is still secured by DB user credentials?
Select this connection as per screenshot. Then fill up all details use your nat instance .pem file to connect. Its like you are connecting to VPC through Nat gateway or Internet gateway bypassing this.
Another option to install VPN on VPC and connect.
So for a project that I am working on at my office, I have a .NET application that will be storing and retrieving data to/from an AWS RDS MySQL Server that I have setup. The problem that I have run into is that port 3306 is not open on the work network.
I have reached out to my networking department to see what they can do about opening this port. They asked me if there was a way to set a static IP to this AWS RDS Instance. They only want to open the port based on the server's IP address rather than open the port 3306 completely for security reasons they say. After some research, I have seen that it is possible to set an elastic IP (similar to static IP?) on an AWS EC2 instance but I am curious about setting a static IP on an AWS RDS Instance. I did not see anywhere on the AWS Dashboard about setting a static IP for my RDS Instance. The reason behind the static IP is so that when the IP that is associated with the endpoint DNS that they provide changes, they wont need to adjust the firewall settings to accommodate this change.
Is it possible to have the port open for only this specific DNS
endpoint that AWS provides? If not, is it possible to set an IP
to static on the RDS instance?
What sort of security concerns are there if they were to completely open port 3306?
Thank you!
You don't need a fixed IP for RDS Instance. When you create a RDS instance AWS service defines a URL for your instance. This URL is fixed. Even in case of IP change the URL will still route to the correct instance.
You can tell your IT team to create a firewall rule in port 3306 for the RDS instance URL and it will work fine.
About the security, the idea is to close the inbound connections on port 3306 to your site. This will restrict anyone trying to connect to your internal instances at the same time that you can connect to all hosts in the internet using this port. There is no need to close all the outbound connections. But...
Is a information security best practice to apply the least privileged access principle. This means: only allow what is specificaly needed. If they open the port for all hosts, maybe in the future, someone can discover a new vulnerability and exploit it, because no one in your IT team will remember why was needed to open the port for all hosts. So.. they keep open only what is needed.
The EC2 instance/live web can connect just fine to the RDS database. But when I want to debug the code in my local machine, I can't connect to the database and got this error:
OperationalError: (2003, "Can't connect to MySQL server on 'aa9jliuygesv4w.c03i1
ck3o0us.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com' (10060)")
I've added .pem and .ppk keys to .ssh and I already configure EB CLI. I don't know what should I do anymore.
FYI: The app is in Django
It turns out it is not that hard. Do these steps:
Go to EC2 Dashboard
Go to Security Groups tab
Select and only select the RDS database security group. You'll see the security group detail at the bottom
Click Inbound tab
Click Edit button
Add Type:MYSQL/Aurora;Protocol:TCP;Range:3306;Source:0.0.0.0/0
MAKE SURE PUBLIC ACCESSIBILITY IS SET TO YES
This is what I spent the last 3 days trying to solve...
Instructions to change Public Accessibility
Accept traffic from any IP address
After creating an RDS instance my security group inbound rule was set to a specific IP address. I had to edit inbound rules to allow access from any IP address.
"Security group rules"
Select a security group
Click "Inbound Rules"
Click "Edit Inbound Rules"
Under "Source" Select the Dropdown and click "Anywhere"
::0 or 0.0.0.0/0 Should appear.
Click "Save Rules"
Just burned two hours going through the great solutions on this page. Time for the stupid answer!
I redid my Security Groups, VPC's, Routing Tables, Subnets, Gateways... NOPE. I copy-pasted the URL from the AWS Console, which in some cases results in a hidden trailing space. The endpoint is in a <div> element, which the browser gives a \n when copying. Pasting this into the Intellij db connector coerces it to a space.
I only noticed the problem after pasting the URL into a quote string in my source code.
Make sure that your VPC and subnets are wide enought.
The following CIDR configuration works great for two subnets:
VPC
10.0.0.0/16
10.0.0.0 — 10.0.255.255 (65536 addresses)
Subnet 1
10.0.0.0/17
10.0.0.0 — 10.0.127.255 (32768 addresses, half)
Subnet 2
10.0.128.0/17
10.0.128.0 — 10.0.255.255 (32768 addresses, other half)
Adjust it if you need three subnets.
I wasn't being able to connect to my RDS database. I've manually reviewed any detail and everything was alright. There were no indications of any issues whatsoever and I couldn't find any suitable information in the documentation. My VPC was configured with narrow CIDR: 10.0.0.0/22 and each subnet had a 255 addresses. After I've changed CIDR to 10.0.0.0/16 and split it totally between two subnets my RDS connection started to working. It was a pure luck that I've managed to find a source of the problem, because it doesn't make any sense to me.
Well almost everyone has pointed out the answers, i will put it in different perspective so that you can understand.
There are two ways to connect to you AWS RDS
You provision an instance in the same VPC & Subnet. You install the workbench you will be able to connect to the DB. You would not need to make it public accessible. Example: You can provision an windows instance in the same VPC group and install workbench and you can connect to the DB via endpoint.
The other way is to make the Db publically accessible to your IP only to prevent unwanted access. You can change the DB security group to allow the DB port traffic to your IP only. In this way your DB will be publically accessible but to you only. This is the way we do for various AWS services we add there security group in the source part of the SG.
If both the options doesn't work then the error is in the VPC routing table, you can check there if it associated with the subnet and also if the internet gateway is attached.
You can watch this video it will clear your doubts:
https://youtu.be/e18NqiWeCHw
In my case, when I upgrade the size. The private address of the rds instance fell into a private subnet of the VPC. You can use the article
My instance is in a private subnet, and I can't connect to it from my local computer to find out your db instance address.
However, changing the route table didn't fix my issue. What I did finally solve my problem is to downgrade the size and then upgrade the size back. Once the private address falls back to the public subnet. Everything works like a charm.
I was also not able to connect even from inside an ec2 instance.
After digging AWS RDS options it turns out that ec2 instances are only able to connect to RDS in the same VPC they are in.
When creating an ec2 instance in the same VPC where the RDS was I could access it as expected.
Do not forget to check if you have your VPN or firewall blocking connection.
The ideal debugging checklist is:
Instance's "Publicly Accessible" property should be enabled
The security group attached to the instance should have open inbound rules (as open as you'd want)
The funny part is still if you're not able to access it - then the problem surely is with your instance lying in a private subnet of the respective VPC.
However, there're more secure ways to access your RDS instance. The best bet would be not make it publicly accessible, lock down security groups and have a P2P relay endpoint (think Tailscale).
In case you've tried all answers above try this...
Recreate the database....
AWS on database creation provides an option to allow public/private access access
I'm sure it's not the proper answer but I added the internet gateway to all my private subnet route tables..
Even though the private subnets and the public subnets are in the subnetgroup.
For me none of the above worked.
What did work was creating a peering connection between my default VPC and the VPC in which the database was created, as it appears that when connecting to resources in AWS, it automatically goes through the default VPC.
Then, set up routing using the peering connection between the 2 VPCs. Also, make sure that your security groups permits postgres ports from your default VPC CIDR block as well. And finally, make sure all the subnets are associated with your route table accessing this peering connection.
I have an app with two workers (Web and Background) on AppHarbor that connect to a MySql database hosted on Amazon's RDS.
I keep getting "Unable to connect to any of the specified MySQL hosts." exception.
The RDS instance in the US-East region and I have added the following AppHarbor CIDR to the security group.
50.17.211.192/28
54.235.159.192/27
I have added my own CIDR to the security group and I connect to the instance just fine.
However when the app is running on AppHarbor it fails.
My connection string (censored) is:
Server=myinstanceXXXX.cykjvptrw5xs.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com;Database=MyDatabase;UID=XXXXXX;PWD=XXXXX;
I have tried including the port 3306 on the server endpoint but it made no difference.
Am I missing something on getting the two to play nice with one another?
By default AppHarbor use Amazon's internal DNS service for resolving hostnames. Because of that Amazon RDS instances in the same region as AppHarbor will resolve the private IP addresses rather than the public ones listed in the knowledge base article, so setting up rules based on the public IPs will not work most of the time.
In case Amazon's DNS service becomes unavailable we'll fail over to an external DNS service. This means you'll still have to configure the external IPs for the highest availability as an external DNS service will resolve the public IPs. This way you can ensure that your application is resilient towards DNS failures.
You can set up security group based access rules for your RDS security group. We've updated this knowledge base article with a section specifically for Amazon RDS where you can find the information necessary to set this up.