AWS Lambda in VPC with RDS and Internet Connection - aws-lambda

I set up an Aurora Database (provisioned) in a newly created VPC and no public accessibility. As I want to run a Lambda function in the VPC which is able to both, access the RDS instances as well as the Internet, I changed the routing tables of the RDS instances to allowing traffic from a NAT gateway which I placed in a public subnet in the same VPC.
For the Lambda function itself, I created a separate private subnet, also just allowing traffic from the NAT gateway in the routing table. I assigned this subnet and VPC to the Lambda function in the Lambda settings. The internet connection works fine with this configuration but I can not access the database. That's why I followed this post (https://serverfault.com/questions/941886/connect-an-aws-lambda-function-triggered-by-api-gateway-to-aurora-serverless-mys) and added the IP CIDR of the Lambda subnet to the Security Group of the RDS instances (called rds-launch-wizard).
Still, the Lambda function is able to interact with the public internet but can not connect to the RDS instances (timeout). I'm running out of ideas, what is wrong here?

The configuration should be:
A Public subnet with a NAT Gateway (and, by definition, an Internet Gateway)
A Private subnet with the Amazon RDS instance
The same, or a different, Private Subnet associated with the Lambda function
The Private Subnet(s) configured with a Route Table with a destination of 0.0.0.0/0 to the NAT Gateway
Then consider the Security Groups:
A security group for the Lambda function (Lambda-SG) that permits all outbound access
A security group for the RDS instance (RDS-SG) that should permit inbound access from Lambda-SG on the appropriate database port
That is, RDS-SG is allowing incoming traffic from Lambda-SG (by name). There is no need to use CIDRs in the security group.
The Lambda function will connect to a private subnet via an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) and will be able to communicate both with the RDS instance (directly) and with the Internet (via the NAT Gateway).
Please note that you are not directing "traffic from the NAT Gateway". Rather, you are directing Internet-bound traffic to the NAT Gateway. Nor is there such a thing as "routing tables of the RDS instances" because the Route Tables are associated with subnets, not RDS.

Related

does my aws lambda produced with zappa has a static ip? [duplicate]

I'm trying to access a external MyQSL database (Not AWS RDS), and I need to have a static IP in order to open up the firewall for accepting connections. Is it possible to set a static IP with a Lambda instance? If not what are some other options?
In order to do that, you need to deploy your Lambda function into a VPC and within the VPC, provide NAT Gateway. Then assign an Elastic IP (static IP) to the NAT Gateway. These two links describe it step-by-step:
AWS: How to Create a Static IP Address Using a NAT Gateway (Medium)
How do I give internet access to my Lambda function in a VPC? (AWS Knowledge Center
I have to do this every year or two and always forget how to do it :) Fortunately, I've discovered the AWS now has a wizard that steps you through this process: https://ap-southeast-2.console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/home?region=ap-southeast-2#wizardFullpagePublicAndPrivate:
The wizard didn't pick up my Elastic IP Allocation ID so I had to manually paste it in from the Elastic IP section of the VPC console but after that everything works. https://ap-southeast-2.console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/home?region=ap-southeast-2#Addresses:sort=PublicIp
Then you just set up your lambda function to use that VPC. The only remaining gotcha is to select the Private Subnet that the wizard created rather than the public subnet (of course).
If you are deploying your Lambda functions using SAM rather than the console you can direct your function to use the VPC by including Policy and VpcConfig sections in your SAM template as shown below.
In another year or two when I have to do this again, I'll hopefully find this answer :)
No, this is not possible.
What you should do instead is:
deploy the Lambda function into the private subnet of a VPC
deploy a NAT Gateway (or NAT instance) into a public subnet of the VPC
deploy an Internet Gateway into the VPC
give the NAT an Elastic IP
make the NAT be the default route for the Lambda subnet
whitelist the NAT's Elastic IP at the remote firewall

Lambda function times out trying to connect to RDS if in VPC, but doesn't if outside VPC

I have a single AWS lambda function that connects to a single AWS RDS Postgres db and simply returns a json list of all records in the db.
If I don't assign a VPC to the lambda function, it is able to access the AWS RDS db. However, if I assign a VPC to the lambda function it can no longer access the db.
The VPC is the same for both the lambda function and the RDS db. I've also opened all traffic on port 0.0.0.0/0 for inbound and outbound connections temporarily to find the issue, but I am still unable to connect.
I believe it might be a role permission related to VPC for the lambda function, but I've already assigned the policy AmazonVPCFullAccess to the lambda role.
The fact that the lambda can access the DB when not in a VPC is a bit troubling in the sense that the DB is then probably public.
A common mistake that often happens is that lambda is deployed to a public subnet. Lambda's only get assigned private IP addresses in a VPC. When deployed to a public subnets, it's only route to the internet is the internet gateway. That doesn't really work well if the lambda itself has a private ip address (the internet couldn't route traffic back to you :P).
One part of the solution is to make sure your lambda is deployed to a private subnet instead with a route to a NAT gateway if it needs access to public resources.
However, the better part of the solution is actually put the database in the private subnet WITHOUT a public IP adresss.
Because I've seen many mistakes with this with my customers, and because it can't be stressed enough: I'd strongly suggest you follow a three-tier networking model with your VPC's. This basically means:
Don't use the default VPC. Create your own.
Create 9 subnets:
3 public
3 private. Put your private lambda's here.
3 isolated. Put your database here.
There are lot's of articles / templates available that do this for you. A quick google search gives me
https://github.com/aws-samples/vpc-multi-tier
https://www.wellarchitectedlabs.com/reliability/100_labs/100_deploy_cloudformation/1_deploy_vpc/

Two similar instances with different internet access availabilities

I have created one ec2 centos instance and then launched another one from that but in the second one , I have disables the public IP so it doesn't have a public IP address.
The instances are in same subnet having the same security group, and roles. The first instance have ínternet access but the second one doesn't have. Is this related to assigning a public IP?
How can I have internet access in an instance without a public IP?
You have two options here:
[1] The first option is to use Elastic IP: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-ip-addresses-eip.html
[2] If you want to have an Internet access without public IP, you need to provision a NAT Gateway and configure route to it.
People generally do this, they create a VPC, create two subnet in it (one Public and One Private), in the Private subnet they launch their instances, and in the public subnet they create a NAT Gateway, and configure the route in the route table so that the instances in the private subnet have a route to internet via NAT Gateway.
[1] NAT Gateway: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-nat-gateway.html
Instances without public IP addresses can access the Internet in one of two ways:
Instances without public IP addresses can route their traffic through a NAT gateway or a NAT instance to access the Internet. These instances use the public IP address of the NAT gateway or NAT instance to traverse the Internet. The NAT gateway or NAT instance allows outbound communication but doesn’t allow machines on the Internet to initiate a connection to the privately addressed instances.
For VPCs with a hardware VPN connection or Direct Connect connection, instances can route their Internet traffic down the virtual private gateway to your existing datacenter. From there, it can access the Internet via your existing egress points and network security/monitoring devices.

AWS Lambda times out connecting to RedShift

My Redshift cluster is in a private VPC. I've written the following AWS Lamba in Node.js which should connect to Redshift (dressed down for this question):
'use strict';
console.log('Loading function');
const pg = require('pg');
exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {
var client = new pg.Client({
user: 'myuser',
database: 'mydatabase',
password: 'mypassword',
port: 5439,
host: 'myhost.eu-west-1.redshift.amazonaws.com'
});
// connect to our database
console.log('Connecting...');
client.connect(function (err) {
if (err) throw err;
console.log('CONNECTED!!!');
});
};
I keep getting Task timed out after 60.00 seconds unfortunately. I see in the logs "Connecting...", but never "CONNECTED!!!".
Steps I've taken so far to get this to work:
As per Connect Lambda to Redshift in Different Availability Zones I have the Redshift cluster and the Lamba function in the same VPC
Also Redshift cluster and the Lamba function are on the same subnet
The Redshift cluster and the Lamba function share the same security group
Added an inbound rule at the security group of the Redshift cluster as per the suggestion here (https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-redshift-loader/issues/86)
The IAM role associated with the Lamba Function has the following policies: AmazonDMSRedshiftS3Role, AmazonRedshiftFullAccess, AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole, AWSLambdaVPCAccessExecutionRole, AWSLambdaENIManagementAccess scrambled together from this source: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/vpc.html (I realize I have some overlap here, but figured that it shouldn't matter)
Added Elastic IP to the Inbound rules of the Security Group as per an answer from a question listed prior (even if I don't even have a NAT gateway configured in the subnet)
I don't have Enhanced VPC Routing enabled because I figured that I don't need it.
Even tried it by adding the Inbound rule 0.0.0.0/0 ALL types, ALL protocols, ALL ports in the Security Group (following this question: Accessing Redshift from Lambda - Avoiding the 0.0.0.0/0 Security Group). But same issue!
So, does anyone have any suggestions as to what I should check?
*I should add that I am not a network expert, so perhaps I've made a mistake somewhere.
The timeout is probably because your lambda in VPC cannot access Internet in order to connect to your cluster(you seem to be using the public hostname to connect). Your connection options depend on your cluster configuration. Since both your lambda function and cluster are in the same VPC, you should use the private IP of your cluster to connect to it. In your case, I think simply using the private IP should solve your problem.
Depending on whether your cluster is publicly accessible, there are some points to keep in mind.
If your cluster is configured to NOT be publicly accessible, you can use the private IP to connect to the cluster from your lambda running in a VPC and it should work.
If you have a publicly accessible cluster in a VPC, and you want to
connect to it by using the private IP address from within the VPC, make sure the following VPC parameters to true/yes:
DNS resolution
DNS hostnames
The steps to verify/change these settings are given here.
If you do not set these parameters to true, connections from within VPC will resolve to the EIP instead of the private IP and your lambda won't be able to connect without having Internet access(which will need a NAT gateway or a NAT instance).
Also, an important note from the documentation here.
If you have an existing publicly accessible cluster in a VPC,
connections from within the VPC will continue to use the EIP to
connect to the cluster even with those parameters set until you resize
the cluster. Any new clusters will follow the new behavior of using
the private IP address when connecting to the publicly accessible
cluster from within the same VPC.
My issues got resolved after adding the CIDR range of the VPC to the Redshift Inbound rules.
For the ones that are trying to move to redshift serverless due to it's recent release to the public... this may be a commom issue but at least for me the answer from #pcothenet worked:
For what it's worth, I had a similar issue. My problem was that I had
set the lambda to have access to my public subnets only. My public
subnet is routing all outbound traffic to an internet gateway, while
my private subnets are routing outbound traffic via an NAT Gateway.
But according to the doc "You cannot use an Internet gateway attached
to your VPC, since that requires the ENI to have public IP addresses."
Switching the lambda to the private subnets (and therefore using the
NAT Gateway) solved the problem. – pcothenet
You must use the Endpoint to connect.
Best.
I had this same issue and followed the steps above and I found that in my case the issue was that the lambda was in a subnet that did not have a route to the NAT gateway. So I moved the lambda into a subnet with route to the NAT gateway.

Amazon ELB in VPC

We're using Amazon EC2, and we want to put an ELB (load balancer) to 2 instances on a private subnet. If we just add the private subnet to the ELB, it will not get any connections, if we attach both subnets to the ELB then it can access the instances, but it often will get time-outs. Has anyone successfully implemented an ELB within the private subnet of their VPC? If so, could you perhaps explain the procedure to me?
Thanks
My teammate and I just have implemented ELB in a VPC with 2 private subnets in different availability zones. The reason you get timeouts is that for each subnet you add to the load balancer, it gets one external IP address. (try 'dig elb-dns-name-here' and you will see several IP addresses). If one of these IP address maps a private subnet, it will timeout. The IP that maps into your public subnet will work. Because DNS may give you any one of the IP addresses, sometimes it works, sometimes it times out.
After some back and forth with amazon, we discovered that the ELB should only be placed in 'public' subnets, that is subnets that have a route out to the Internet Gateway. We wanted to keep our web servers in our private subnets but allow the ELB to talk to them. To solve this, we had to ensure that we had a corresponding public subnet for each availability zone in which we had private subnets. We then added to the ELB, the public subnets for each availability zone.
At first, this didn't seem to work, but after trying everything, we recreated the ELB and everything worked as it should. I think this is a bug, or the ELB was just in an odd state from so many changes.
Here is more or less what we did:
WebServer-1 is running in PrivateSubnet-1 in availability zone us-east-1b with security group called web-server.
WebServer-2 is running in PrivateSubnet-2 in availability zone us-east-1c with security group called web-server.
Created a public subnet in zone us-east-1b, we'll call it PublicSubnet-1. We ensured that we associated the routing table that includes the route to the Internet Gateway (ig-xxxxx) with this new subnet. (If you used the wizard to create a public/private VPC, this route already exists.)
Created a public subnet in zone us-east-1c, we'll call it PublicSubnet-2. We ensured that we associated the routing table that includes the route to the Internet Gateway (ig-xxxxx) with this new subnet. (If you used the wizard to create a public/private VPC, this route already exists.)
Created a new ELB, adding to it PublicSubnet-1 and PublicSubnet-2 (not the PrivateSubnet-X). Also, picked the instances to run in the ELB, in this case WebServer-1 and WebServer-2. Made sure to assign a security group that allows incoming port 80 and 443. Lets call this group elb-group.
In the web-server group, allow traffic from port 80 and 443 from the elb-group.
The key here is understanding, that you are not "Adding subnets/availability zones" to ELB, but rather specifying what subnets to put ELB instances into.
Yes, ELB is a software load balancer and when you create ELB object, a custom loadbalancing EC2 instance is put into the all subnets that you specified. So for the ELB (its instances) to be accessible, they have to be put into the subnets that have default route configured via IGW (most likely you classified these subnets as public).
So as already was answered above, you have to specify "public" networks for ELB, and those networks should be from the AZs where your EC2 instances are running. In this case ELB instances will be able to reach your EC2 instances (as long as security groups are configured correctly)
We've implemented ELB in a private subnet so the statement that all ELB's need to be public isn't completely true. You do need a NAT. Create a private subnet for the private ELB's, turn on VPC DNS and then make sure the private routing table is configured to go through the NAT. The subnet security groups also need to be setup to allow traffic between ELB and App, and App to DB subnets.
Beanstalk health checks won't work as they can't reach the load balancer, but for services that need to be outside of the public reach this is a good compromise.
Suggested reading to get your VPC architecture started: http://blog.controlgroup.com/2013/10/14/guided-creation-of-cloudformation-templates-for-vpc/.
You must add the following settings.
Public subnet zone b = Server NAT
Private subnet zone c = Server Web
Public subnet zone c = ELB
The trick is routing:
The router to NAT is attach with gateway A.
The router to Server Web is attach to NAT.
The router to Public subnet is attach with gateway A.
ELB details:
1.Zone: Public subnet zone c
2.Instance: Server Web
3.Security Groups: enable ports
http://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/UserScenariosForVPC.html
Adding a diagram to Nathan's answer. Full medium post here: https://nav7neeet.medium.com/load-balance-traffic-to-private-ec2-instances-cb07058549fd

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