I have a Laravel application (API) that I am trying to move to AWS, however, the DB sits privately in AWS and is only accessible to me through a VPN.
The database is an RDS instance.
How can I provide my EC2 instance with access to the RDS Database?
I want to know the possibility of having a application server (linux machine) spinned up using ecs ?
I.e An Ec2 instance running an application which serves user requests .
To be more clear.. can we spin up a ec2 via a container ?
Today I've created Amazon Aurora Serverless cluster for PostGreSql in us-west-2, ensured the VPC and security groups in
a way that, it should be publicly accessibly. But I'm not able to connect that cluster using the aurora endpoint from my Navicat/PgAdmin4 desktop client. Then I tried from the EC2 instance that are in same security group/vpc as like as Aurora Serverless, then it worked.
From AWS froum,
You can't give an Aurora Serverless DB cluster a public IP address.
You can access an Aurora Serverless DB cluster only from within a
virtual private cloud (VPC) based on the Amazon VPC service.
Source: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=862860&tstart=0
Seems it uses an internal AWS networking setup that currently only supports connections from inside a VPC, and it must be the same VPC where the serverless cluster is deployed.
So now basically my question is that,
Is there any workaround to connect Aurora Serverless with any client like Navicat or PgAdmin4?
I found a cool hack that is working perfectly for my development purpose with some tweaks and I know I don't need this on my production environment.
So as we know Aurora Serverless works only inside VPC. So make sure you are attempting to connect to Aurora within the VPC and the security group assigned to the Aurora cluster has the appropriate rules to allow access. As I mention earier that I already have an EC2 instance, Aurora Serverless and a VPC around both. So I can access it from my EC2 but not from my local pc/ local sql client. To fix that I did below two steps.
1. To access from any client(Navicat in my case),
a. First need to add GENERAL db configurations like aurora endpoint host, username, password etc.
b. Then, need to add SSH configuration, like EC2 machine username, hostip and .pem file path
2. To access from project,
First I create a ssh tunnel from my terminal like this way,
ssh ubuntu#my_ec2_ip_goes_here -i rnd-vrs.pem -L 5555:database-1.my_aurora_cluster_url_goes_here.us-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com:5432
Then run my project with db configuration like this way test.php,
$conn = pg_connect("host=127.0.0.1 port=5555 dbname=postgres user=postgres password=password_goes_here");
// other code goes here to get data from your database
if (!$conn) {
echo "An error occurred.\n";
exit;
}
$result = pg_query($conn, "SELECT * FROM brands");
if (!$result) {
echo "An error occurred.\n";
exit;
}
while ($row = pg_fetch_row($result)) {
echo "Brand Id: $row[0] Brand Name: $row[1]";
echo "<br />\n";
}
This question comes up over and over for multiple AWS services (most new ones are VPC only by default). The short answer is - you can hack up something and expose the DB outside of the VPC, but it is not recommended for a production setup. Assuming this is for a dev setup, by all means try the recommendations from [1]. It is for Neptune, but you can do the exact same thing for Aurora.
[1] Connect to Neptune on AWS from local machine
My specific need is to get the list of EC2 instances in the deployment from within one of the instances.
I've tried using AWS command line for example aws elb describe-load-balancers however it would just give details of all my AWS services. I know you can specify an instances name with --load-balancer-name but I just don't have access to that from within the instance automatically.
Perhaps a file can be created on instance creation by placing something in .ebextensions?
You can do it in a two step process using the AWS CLI.
First you get the endpoint for your Elastic Beanstalk application:
aws elasticbeanstalk describe-environments --query='Environments[?ApplicationName==`Your-application-name`].EndpointURL'
Then you use the endpoint to get the instances:
aws elb describe-load-balancers --query='LoadBalancerDescriptions[?DNSName==`load-balancer-end-point-from-previous-step`].Instances[0]'
Do I need to create an EC2 instance in order to remotely connect to my Amazon RDS instance?
I understand that setting up an Amazon RDS instance automagically creates an EC2 instance 'in the background'. But when looking into my EC2 console I don't see that hidden instance so I can't find the details for the public DNS or Elastic IP, neither the EC2 instance key that I need to connect through SSH.
Yes, an RDS instance creates an EC2 instance to run the database but you don't have direct access to it via ssh, which is kind of the point.
RDS is a service that is managed for you and the idea is to hide the implementation details and simply provide an endpoint to connect to from another EC2 instance. You can find the endpoint name in the EC2 console - just use this as the hostname to connect to from your application and you can treat RDS just like any other database.
Amazon need to maintain a level of control over the server in order to provide it as a service and ssh access would interfere with that. There are a few things you miss out on because of this (e.g. direct access to DB files) but these are far outweighed by having Amazon manage upgrades, backups and replication for you.