Ensuring unique IP addresses in ec2 - amazon-ec2

Say I want the same AMI image to run in two different ec2 instances with different IPs.
Will suffice by ensuring a different AWS location or do I need to specifically allocate different VPCs for each instance?
Thanks in advance.

Each instance will have a unique IP address. You certainly don't need to separate them into different VPCs or anything. An AMI does not have a specific IP address tied to it. Each time you create an instance from an AMI the new instance will have a unique IP address. If that wasn't the case, auto-scaling wouldn't work at all.

Related

How do I look up the IP address range used by my AWS load balancer for creating instances?

My API accesses a service that wants to know what the possible IP address range is for the API so they can whitelist us. How do I know what IP addresses AWS may assign when the load balancer creates new instances?
Direct answer: AWS publishes its IP address ranges in a publicly accessible JSON file. IP ranges are associated with a region and a service, and as you can imagine, there are a lot of them. At the current moment there are 71 CIDR blocks associated with EC2 in us-west-2, for example. That's as specific as you can get, though. So you'd have to supply your partner with all of the EC2 IP address ranges for your region in order to guarantee that they would permit any IP address assigned to an instance your autoscale group might start up. Oh, and they do change periodically, so your partner would have to maintain that list.
Suggestion: Sounds like you have your EC2 instances in public subnets and are assigning public IPs to them. Instead, you can create your EC2 instances in private subnets and use a NAT Gateway to allow them to access the Internet. If you do this, the source IP for outbound traffic will the be the elastic IP address you assign to the NAT gateway. So you can give your partner a definite IP address they can permit to access their service.
Using a private subnet for your EC2 instances also reduces your attack surface area, since the EC2 instances won't have individual public IP addresses.

Why can instances in my VPC still ping instances in different subnet?

I have a VPC. In it I have two sub-nets (subnet-1, subnet-2).
Subnet-1 has these EC2 instances: 10.0.0.66, 10.0.0.83
Subnet-2 has these EC2 instances: 10.0.0.203, 10.0.0.208
I would expect to be able to ping from 10.0.0.66 to 10.0.0.83 and I can.
However, I would not expect to be able to ping from 10.0.0.203 to 10.0.0.83 but I can. I thought the whole point of a subnet was to keep instances in it isolated from other subnets? Why then can I ping across subnets?
Yes, You can able to Ping/SSH all your instance within your VPC.
When you create your VPC with your preferred CIDR range,Your main Route table will be created automatically and which will allow you to reach whole CIDR range. It does not matter how many subnets you have created under the VPC. This is default behavior in AWS.
If you want to block the access from one subnet to another subnet you can restrict.Select VPC associated Network ACL and edit the Inbound rule. By default source will be 0.0.0.0/0 ,You Mention the subnet which you want to access. You can restrict based on protocol/Port also.Post changes You can't reach from the subnet which you have not allowed.
For Reference : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Subnets.html

Runing multiple instances with the same, single ip address

Using Amazon VPC, what is the best possible way to attach multiple instances to a single ip address?
My company needs the ability to open/shutdown instances upon request and traffic. All instances created must have the same ip address attached, as the service I try to connect to allows only certain IPs that I can define every once in a while.
You want to use Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). It was built specifically for the purpose of balancing a large number of requests to the same IP across several EC2 instances.
http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/
If you want to whitelist the IPs of your instances to some other third party service, then you would have to use elastic IPs in that case. You can not associate one IP to more than one instance.
However, if you want only one endpoint for your service, you can very well use load balancer as also suggested above.

Can EC2 instances in different regions communicate over their private IP addresses?

I have two EC2 instances from an Ubuntu image, they are located in different regions.
I just want to ask, whether they can communicate over the private IP addresses?
I have opened the required ports with a security group. I use netcat to test the communication, but it only works, when I use the public IP addresses.
It is not possible to communicate between Amazon EC2 regions via the private IP addresses (except if you setup a VPN and respective routing for this, see section VPN Solution below), traffic between regions is in fact passing the public internet and is not distinguishable from any other internet traffic, see e.g. the following FAQs from the Region and Availability Zone FAQ:
Can instances use group-based firewall rules across Regions? - No. Group-based firewall rules only work within a Region. If you need instances to communicate with each other across Regions, you should use CIDR based firewall rules. [...]
What is the cost for data transfer between Regions? - Data transferred from one Region to another is charged at both sides at the Internet data transfer rate.
This applies to an Amazon VPC as well, see e.g. the FAQ Can Amazon EC2 instances within a VPC in one region communicate with Amazon EC2 instances within a VPC in another region?:
Yes, as long as all communication takes place over the Internet
Gateway of each VPC and uses the Elastic IP addresses assigned to the
instances in each VPC. Please note: security groups cannot span
regions. All traffic filtering between instances in one VPC and
instances in another VPC must use the Elastic IP addresses as the
specified source or destination address. [emphasis mine]
VPN Solution
AWS has meanwhile released two walkthroughs describing a solution for Connecting Multiple VPCs with EC2 Instances based on either IPsec or OpenVPN:
Connecting Multiple VPCs with EC2 Instances (IPSec)
please note that this tutorial facilitates Openswan, but you can achieve the same with strongSwan (or even the Linux IPsec stack built in as of kernel 2.6+, see e.g. IPsec L2TP VPN server)
Connecting Multiple VPCs with EC2 Instances (SSL)
Now you can do it with AWS VPC peer connection.
It enables the resources in two VPCs that are in different regions, even in different accounts, to be able to communicate with the private IP address, just like in the same LAN.
One thing you need to know is the CIDR blocks you choose for your both VPCs, they must not be in conflict. Otherwise, the peer connection can't be made successfully.
See the official doc about VPC peer connection.

Using static IP address with Amazon EC2

I want to use the Amazon Web Service free micro-instance for my different projects for testing and personal purpose. But I required some static-public IP on which I can run my server.
Is that possible? From where I can buy just IP and use it with my AWS?
EC2 Elastic IP Addresses
Elastic IPs are tied to an account, not an instance.
You need to look at AWS VPC for this.
Whilst VPC is free outside of the usual instance pricing, it doesn't work with Micro instances (the cheapest ones).
When not using VPC, you're assigned IP addresses through DHCP. When the DHCP lease expires, or you restart, your IP is released back to the pool.
VPC lets you use private IP addressing, you can use it with Elastic IPs and is much easier to integrate with a physical infrastructure setup.
If you're only testing/investigating AWS and have little or no budget to use anything other than a Micro instance, I'd just suck it up and deal with the changing of IPs.
If you've got a budget that lets you use instances other than Micro, then go for VPC.
Also, if you're doing more than testing/investigating I'd recommend starting with VPC straight away as trying to migrate from a non VPC to a VPC infrastructure is a massive PITA.
For every AWS account, 5 free elastic ips are provided. You have to just allocate them to required instance. But make sure that the allocate address(newly created elastic ip) in in use, because you will billed if the Elastic ip is not in use.
Looks like they have configured ARP statically so you can only use the IP address on an instance that was bound to that instance through the EC2 management console.
I just configured one of my instances to use a static IP address other than the one assigned through the management console and rebooted the instance.
I'm still receiving ARP responses on the old address but not receiving ARP responses on the new address at all.
Unfortunately for me, I have a not responding instance (NFS File Server) stuck in a stopping state while I attempt to terminate it.
The IP Address bound to that instance cannot be re-assigned to a replacement instance so now I have to reconfigure
On the whole pricing delima: When you come to think of it, there is a limited amount of static IPs so there must some pricing (supply and demand). This pricing is two fold: 1) for upto a limited number (5 per account) you don't have to pay. 2) if you created one you need to use it if you don't you'll be billed (to prevent every user to get 5 static IPs)

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