How aws accounts are differentiated? - aws-vpc

I am aware that we can create a vpc by providing a ipv4 cidr range . Imagine I have two AWS accounts with cidr range 10.0.0.0/16 in same region. How are these two VPCs differentiated ? . Might be a dumb question for some . But it would be of great help if you can help me to understand .
Thanks

Base on AWS VPC documents:
A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. It is logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS Cloud. You can launch your AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, into your VPC. You can specify an IP address range for the VPC, add subnets, associate security groups, and configure route tables.
A subnet is a range of IP addresses in your VPC. You can launch AWS resources into a specified subnet. Use a public subnet for resources that must be connected to the internet, and a private subnet for resources that won't be connected to the internet. For more information about public and private subnets, see VPC and Subnet Basics.
To protect the AWS resources in each subnet, you can use multiple layers of security, including security groups and network access control lists (ACL). For more information, see Security.
So, it's like the Local network in each company, the different AWS account isolated like that.
When you want to connect two LAN, your option is tunneling and network route between them. Also, you can do same on AWS too.
Finally, for more information read the VPC docs:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Introduction.html
https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/

Related

Amazon RDS Endpoint internal

How can I make ec2 instance communicate with rds instance on aws by internal ip address or dns?
I only see public dns like xxx.cehmrvc73g1g.eu-west-1.rds.amazonaws.com:3306
Will internal ipaddress will be faster than public dns?
Thanks
A note for posterity, ensure that you enable DNS on the VPC Peering link!
Enabling DNS Resolution Support for a VPC Peering Connection
To enable a VPC to resolve public IPv4 DNS hostnames to private IPv4
addresses when queried from instances in the peer VPC, you must modify
the peering connection.
Both VPCs must be enabled for DNS hostnames and DNS resolution.
To enable DNS resolution support for the peering connection
Open the Amazon VPC console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/.
In the navigation pane, choose Peering Connections.
Select the VPC peering connection, and choose Actions, Edit DNS
Settings.
To ensure that queries from the peer VPC resolve to private IP
addresses in your local VPC, choose the option to enable DNS
resolution for queries from the peer VPC.
If the peer VPC is in the same AWS account, you can choose the option
to enable DNS resolution for queries from the local VPC. This ensures
that queries from the local VPC resolve to private IP addresses in the
peer VPC. This option is not available if the peer VPC is in a
different AWS account.
Choose Save.
If the peer VPC is in a different AWS account, the owner of the peer
VPC must sign into the VPC console, perform steps 2 through 4, and
choose Save.
You can use the "Endpoint" DNS name. It will resolve to the internal IP when used within the VPC and resolves to a public ip when used outside of your AWS network. You should never use the actual IP address because the way the RDS works it could possibly change in the future.
If you ping it from your EC2 (on the same VPC) server you can verify this.
It is amazing to see the amount of down votes I've got given that my answer is the only correct answer, here is 2 other sources:
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=70112
You can use the "Endpoint" DNS name. It will resolve to the internal IP when used within EC2.
https://serverfault.com/questions/601548/cant-find-the-private-ip-address-for-my-amazon-rds-instance2
The DNS endpoint provided in the AWS console will resolve to the internal IPs from within Amazon's network.
Check out the AWS EC2 docs: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-instance-addressing.html#concepts-private-addresses.
It doesn't appear that this necessarily applies to RDS, however.
When resolving your RDS instance from within the same VPC the internal IP is returned by the Amazon DNS service.
If the RDS instance is externally accessible you will see the external IP from outside the VPC. However, if the EC2 instance NOT available publiclly the internal IP address is returned to external and internal lookups.
Will internal ip address will be faster than the external address supplied by public dns?
Most likely as the packets will need to be routed when using the external addresses, increasing latency.
It also requires that your EC2 instances have a public IP or NAT gateway along with appropriate security groups and routes, increasing cost, increasing complexity and reducing security.
its pretty easy, telnet your RDS endpoint using command prompt on windows or through unix terminal
for example: telnet "you RDS endpoint" "Port"
trying to connect "You get your RDS internal IP here"

Why might the CIDR/IP in DB security group be different from instance elastic IP?

I have an EC2 instance, which is able to connect to my RDS instance, yet its elastic IP does not appear in the DB security group of whitelisted IP's.
How might this be?
I ask because I have created a new instance, which I also want to whitelist and just entering its elastic IP does not seem like the way to do things since none of the other servers have their elastic IP listed.
Thanks in advance,
There might be two causes here:
Traffic Sources
Security Group Rules do not necessarily specify IP addresses as traffic sources alone, rather regularly will refer to other security groups as well:
The source can be an individual IP address (203.0.113.1), a range of
addresses (e.g., 203.0.113.0/24), or an EC2 security group. The
security group can be another group in your AWS account, a group in
another AWS account, or the security group itself.
By specifying a security group as the source, you allow incoming
traffic from all instances that belong to the source security group.
[...] You might specify another security group in your account if you're creating a
three-tier web service (see Creating a Three-Tier Web Service).
[emphasis mine]
Consequently, the DB security group of your Amazon RDS instance might refer to the EC2 security group used for your Amazon EC2 instance, implying respective access rights already. See my answer to AWS - Configuring access to EC2 instance from Beanstalk App for more details regarding this concept/approach.
Public vs. Private IP Addresses
You might see the effect of a little known, but nonetheless important and quite helpful feature of the AWS DNS infrastructure, see section Public and Private Addresses on page Using Instance IP Addresses:
Amazon EC2 also provides an internal DNS name and a public DNS name
that map to the private and public IP addresses respectively. The
internal DNS name can only be resolved within Amazon EC2. The public
DNS name resolves to the public IP address outside the Amazon EC2
network and the private IP address within the Amazon EC2 network. [emphasis mine]
That is, it's resolving the public DNS (e.g. ec2-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com) to the private IP address when you are using it inside the Amazon EC2 network, and to the public or elastic IP address when using it outside the Amazon EC2 network.
Accordingly, the various AWS products are usually wired up between each other by means of their private IP Addresses rather than external ones for a variety of reasons, most importantly network speed and cost (see my answer to AWS EC2 Elastic IPs bandwidth usage and charges for details).
Consequently, the DB security group of your Amazon RDS instance might refer to the private IP address of your Amazon EC2 instance, implying respective access rights accordingly.

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.

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

Why am I unable to associate an Elastic IP to an EC2 instance in a second VPC on AWS?

I have for a long time a VPC (with 1 subnet) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with several instances each having an Elastic IP address.
For new needs, I have defined a second VPC (with 1 subnet also) on my same account: for some reasons, I can't associate EIP (which is allocated with no problem) to instances launched in VPC #2: the interactive wizard of the console only presents me the instances of the first VPC.
Is it a known limitation or am I doing something wrong?
Two questions:
How many EIP's do you have on your account?
Is the 2nd VPC using a NAT instance to access the Internet?
EIP addresses should only be used on instances in subnets configured to route their traffic directly to the Internet Gateway. EIPs cannot be used on instances in subnets configured to use a NAT instance to access the Internet. (aws.amazon.com)

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