Grant containers internetaccess in awsvpc network mode - amazon-ec2

The situation is as follows:
Two containers reside in the same task definition.
A service with this task definition is running on a specific ec2 instance.
I've configured the VPC of this instance to use a NAT gateway.
This has been successful I think, because I can now ping to google from the instance itself.
The problem however, is that the docker containers that are running on my instance don't have internet access.
Switching the network mode to bridge would obviously solve this problem, but I need bidirectional REST traffic in between these two containers. Only unidirectional traffic is possible with bridge-mode, as far as I know.
My question:
What can I do to gain internet access from within my containers?

Related

Terraform setup tips: TLS communication across VPCs

I'm working for a client that has a simple enough problem:
They have EC2s in two different Regions/VPCs that are hosting microservices. Up to this point all EC2s only needed to communicate with EC2 instances that were in the same subnet, but now we need to provision our infrastructure so that specific ec2s in VPC A's public subnet can call specific ec2s in VPC B's public subnet (and vice versa). Communications would be calling restful APIs over over HTTPS/TLS 2.0
This is nothing revolutionary but IT moves slowly and I want to create a Terraform proof of concept that:
Creates two VPCs
Creates a public subnet in each
Creates an EC2 in each
Installs httpd in the EC2 along with a Cert to use SSL/TLS
Creates the proper security groups so that only IPs associated with the specific instance can call the relevant service
There is no containerization at this client, just individual EC2s for each app with 1 or 2 backups to distribute the load. I'm working with terraform so I can submit different ideas to them for consideration, such as using VPC Peering, Elastic IPs, NAT Gateways, etc.
I can see how to use Terraform to make these infrastructural changes, but I'm not sure how to create EC2s that install a server that can use a temp cert to demonstrate HTTPS traffic. I see a tech called Packer, but was also thinking I should just create a custom AMI that does this.
What would the best solution be? This doesn't have to be production-ready so I'm favoring creating a fast stable proof-of-concept.
I would use the EC2 user_data option in Terraform to install httpd and create your SSL cert. Packer is great if you want to create AMIs to spin up, but since this is an POC and you are not doing any complex configuration that would take long to perform, I would just use user_data.

How to deploy Netfilex Eureka Server and Eureka Client with docker Network on AWS ECS cluster

I am migrating my spring cloud eureka application to AWS ECS and currently having some trouble doing so.
I have an ECS cluster on AWS in which two EC2 services was created
Eureka-server
Eureka-client
each service has a Task running on it.
QUESTION:
how do i establish a "docker network" amongst these two services such that i can register my eureka-client to the eureka-server's registry? Having them in the same cluster doesn't seem to do the trick.
locally i am able to establish a "docker network" to achieve this task. is it possible to have a "docker network" on AWS?
The problem here lies on the way how ECS clusters work. If you go to your dashboard and check out your task definition, you'll see an ip address which AWS assigns to the resource automatically.
In Eureka's case, you need to somehow obtain this ip address while deploying your eureka client apps and use it to register to your eureka-server. But of course your task definitions gets destroyed and recreated again somehow so you easily lose it.
I've done this before and there are couple of ways to achieve this. Here is one of the ways:
For the EC2 instances that you intend to spread ECS tasks as eureka-server or registry, you need to assign Elastic IP Addresses so you always know where to connect to in terms of a host ip address.
You also need to tag them properly so you can refer them in the next step.
Then switching back to ECS, when deploying your eureka-server tasks, inside your task definition configuration, there's an argument as placement_constraint
This will allow you to add a tag to your tasks so you can place those in the instances you assigned elastic ip addresses in the previous steps.
Now if this is all good and you deployed everything, you should be able to refer your eureka-client apps to that ip and have them registered.
I know this looks dirty and kind of complicated but the thing is Netflix OSS project for Eureka has missing parts which I believe is their proprietary implementation for their internal use and they don't want to share.
Another and probably a cooler way of doing this is using a Route53 domain or alias record for your instances so instead of using an elastic ip, you can also refer them using a DNS.

How to let Docker containers broadcast their IP addresses or hostnames to each other?

One aspect of Docker that has always made me thinking is what's the appropriate way to let different containers that collectively make up an application's architecture about each others IPs and host names.
So let's pretend that we have a Docker deployment topology similar to this:
Each orange node represents a Container. All the containers might be running on the same physical machine or each container might have its dedicated EC2 instance. It is also possible that all Author nodes reside on one EC2 instance, and all the Publisher nodes on their own EC2 instance.
But for the sake of this question, we can assume that they are all running on a Developer's local machine, or each one is running on its own dedicated EC2 instance.
How can I let all of the instances get IP addresses and/or hostnames of all the other instances as they come and go?
So when Author 2 dies, Author 1, Author N, as well as Publisher 1,2 and N should be notified of this event. Similarly, when a new Publisher joins the topology, all other instances should be notified of its IP address and/or hostname.
I am looking for a solution for both my local development environment, as well as one that's suitable for a production AWS deployment. Ideally, the same solution should work both locally and on AWS.
ETCd is exactly what you want. AWS doesn't support any sort of multicast or broadcast traffic on their native network. Etcd which is part of CoreOS gives you a framework for service discovery. It allows you to discover nodes along with registering nodes.
https://github.com/coreos/etcd

Amazon EC2 autoscaling instances with elastic IPs

Is there any way to make new instances added to an autoscaling group associate with an elastic IP? I have a use case where the instances in my autoscale group need to be whitelisted on remote servers, so they need to have predictable IPs.
I realize there are ways to do this programmatically using the API, but I'm wondering if there's any other way. It seems like CloudFormation may be able to do this.
You can associate an Elastic IP to ASG instances using manual or scripted API calls just as you would any other instance -- however, there is no automated way to do this. ASG instances are designed to be ephemeral/disposable, and Elastic IP association goes against this philosophy.
To solve your problem re: whitelisting, you have a few options:
If the system that requires predictable source IPs is on EC2 and under your control, you can disable IP restrictions and use EC2 security groups to secure traffic instead
If the system is not under your control, you can set up a proxy server with an Elastic IP and have your ASG instances use the proxy for outbound traffic
You can use http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ to gain complete control over instance addressing, including network egress IPs -- though this can be time consuming
There are 3 approaches I could find to doing this. Cloud Formation will just automate it but you need to understand what's going on first.
1.-As #gabrtv mentioned use VPC, this lends itself to two options.
1.1-Within a VPC use a NAT Gateway to route all traffic in and out of the Gateway. The Gateway will have an Elastic IP and internet traffic then whitelist the NAT Gateway on your server side. Look for NAT gateway on AWS documentation.
1.2-Create a Virtual Private Gateway/VPN connection to your backend servers in your datacenter and route traffic through that.
1.2.a-Create your instances within a DEDICATED private subnet.
1.2.b-Whitelist the entire subnet on your side, any request from that subnet will be allowed in.
1.2.c Make sure your routes in the Subnet are correct.
(I'm skipping 2 on purpose since that is 1.2)
3.-The LAZY way:
Utilize AWS Opsworks to do two things:
1st: Allocate a RESOURCE Pool of Elastic IPs.
2nd: Start LOAD instances on demand and AUTO assign them one elastic ip from the Pool.
For the second part you will need to have the 24/7 instances be your minimum and the Load instances be your MAX. AWS Opsworks now allows Cloud Watch alarms to trigger instance startup so it is very similar to ASG.
The only disadvantage of Opsworks is that instances aren't terminated but stopped instead when the load goes down and that you must "create" instances beforehand. Also you depend on Chef solo to initiate your instances but is the only way to get auto assigning EIPs to your newly created instances that I could find.
Cheers!

Amazon VPC testing

I sell a product that runs on Amazon EC2. A company now wants to purchase and install it within their perimeter... This also implies the use of a VPN connection to the EC2 datacenter.
I want to test my product using Amazon VPN (VPC) before handing over the code. Must I change my code to make it work across VPC? If I run on Windows, then wants the quickest and easiest desktop VPN client avaialable that will allow me to connect across VPN to the Amazon datacenter?
Make sure you setup NAT servers and set your routes in the AWS console. Your client can have some security infrastructure for extending their data center to the cloud - firewall rules at the VPC level etc. Disable firewall rules on the server you deploy to since your VPC already takes care of this. As root execute the following command. service iptables stop (you probably already know this I am guessing)
Is it important for your app to run across VPCs?
Depending on how large the company you are selling to is, their security team may give them the run around to have VPC to VPC communication. Is it important for your software to span across VPCs?

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