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/
I am trying to access my EC2 instance configured with elasticsearch from a configured lambda function.
I've added the lambda function to the same VPC and security group as the EC2 instance. I am not sure; what's causing the issue ?
I've EC2FullAccess permissions from lambda function
The correct security configuration should be:
A security group on the Lambda function (Lambda-SG). It does not require any Inbound rules. Leave the Outbound rules as standard 'allow all'.
A security group on the EC2 instance (Elasticsearch-SG) that allows Inbound connections on the desired port (9200?) from the Lambda-SG.
That is, Elasticsearch-SG specifically allows inbound connections from Lambda-SG.
Please note that security group rules apply to each instance individually. Putting two resources 'in' the same security group does not permit access between those resources unless there is a rule that allows inbound access from itself. Thus, it is better to put different security groups on each layer of resources.
There is no need to assign EC2FullAccess permissions to the Lambda function. That is only used to call AWS to do things like launching or terminating EC2 instances.
I am trying to write AWS lambda function which gets user from AWS Cognito using AWS.CognitoIdentityServiceProvider.adminGetUser and then stores some data into AWS Elasticache (Redis). The parts work fine separately, but not together, as it seems that when I enable VPC for Lambda (to be able to access Elasticache), I loose access to Cognito (Lambda times out).
Is there a way to access both services from single lambda function, or my approach is totally wrong?
Yes, you can for sure. You need to create a NAT Gateway or NAT instance in a public subnet of your VPC, then add a rule to the route table that enables NAT from lambda's security group. I don't think there are public Cognito IP addresses, therefore your security outbound group rule CIDR would be 0.0.0.0/0.
More details are available on official docs here and also there are tons of tutorials online, because it's a common problem. Good luck!
P.S. Don't forget to add permissions for adminGetUser action to lambda's IAM role.
hello I want to call a api which is hoisted in Apache server on AWS EC2 server from my lambda function.
I have configured VPC for my lambda function according to my EC2 server instance with same security groups and same zone ,but still no luck.
Thanks in advance.
It appears that your situation is:
You want to make an HTTP/S API call from an AWS Lambda function to an Amazon EC2 instance
The Lambda function has been configured to connect to the same VPC as the EC2 instance
The Lambda function is reporting that it is unable to connect to the EC2 instance
I would recommend:
Create a Security Group (let's call it Lambda-SG) in the same VPC. It does not need any rules.
Configured the Lambda function to use the Security Group (in the Network section)
Create another Security Group (let's call it EC2-SG) and associate it with the EC2 instance. Add a rule that permits inbound access on the desired port, with the source set to ID of Lambda-SG.
That is the EC2-SG is saying that it will accept inbound connects from Lambda-SG on the desired port.
Merely putting resources in the same security group does not necessarily mean they can communicate. There needs to be a specific rule that permits the inbound access. The above method is the best way to do so.
I have a Lambda function that needs to read messages from an SQS queue using it's URL. Then it needs to insert that data to Cassandra running on a server inside a VPC.
I am able to access the Cassandra server from my Lambda function, using it's private IP and configuring the security groups correctly.
However, I am not able to read messages from the SQS Queue. When I change the configuration of Lambda function to No VPC, then I am able to read the messages from the SQS Queue. However, with VPC settings, it just times out.
How can I overcome this ? I have checked the security group of my Lambda function has full outbound access to all IP addresses.
At the end of 2018, AWS announced support for SQS endpoints which provide
connectivity to Amazon SQS without requiring an internet gateway, network address translation (NAT) instance, or VPN connection.
There is a tutorial for Sending a Message to an Amazon SQS Queue from Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
See also the SQS VPC Endpoints Documentation for more information.
Its important to note that if you want to access SQS within the Lambda VPC there are a couple other things you need to do:
Make sure to specify the SQS region in your code. For example, I had to set my endpoint_url to "https://sqs.us-west-2.amazonaws.com"
Make sure that you have attached a "wide open" security group to the SQS VPC Interface, otherwise SQS will not work.
Make sure that your subnets in your Lambda VPC match what you have set up for your SQS VPC Interface.
Some services (e.g. S3) are offering VPC endpoints to solve this particular problem but SQS is not one of them. I think the only real solution to this problem is to run a NAT inside your VPC so the network traffic from the Lambda function can be routed to the outside world.
I ran into the same kind of problem when I was running lambda function with access to elasticache on the VPC. While the function was configured to run in the VPC, I wasnt able to talk to any other service (specifically codedeploy for me).
As #garnaat pointed out NAT seems to be the only way to go about solving this problem for services without VPC endpoints.
And like you pointed out, I also ran into the same trouble where I could'nt SSH into the machine(s) once I replaced the entry with the IGW in the route table. Seems like detaching the IGW starves the VPC of either the incoming traffic (mostly) or the outgoing traffic from or to the internet respectively. So here's what I did and it worked for me:
Create a new Subnet within the VPC
Now, when lambda runs, make sure lambda operates from this subnet.
You can do this by using aws-cli like so:
aws lambda update-function-configuration --function-name your-function-name --vpc-config SubnetIds="subnet-id-of-created-subnet",SecurityGroupIds="sg-1","sg-2"
Make sure you add all the security groups whose inbound and outbound traffic rules apply for your lambda function.
Next, go to Route Tables in the VPC console and create a new route table.
Here is where you add the NAT gateway to the target.
finally go to the Subnet Associations tab in the new route table and add the newly created subnet there.
Thats all this should get it working . Mind you, please treat this as only a workaround. I haven't done much digging and I have a very limited idea on how things get resolved internally while doing this. This might not be an ideal solution.
The ideal solution seems to be to design the VPC before hand. Use subnets to isolate resources/instances that need internet access and that dont(private and public subnets) and place appropriate gateways where needed.( so that you may not have to create a seperate subnet for this purpose later). Thanks
I was unable to get either of the other two answers to this question to work. Perhaps this is due to one or more mistakes on my part. Regardless, I did find a workaround that I wanted to share, in case I'm not alone with this problem.
Solution: I created two Lambda functions. The first Lambda function runs inside my VPC and performs the desired work (in mandeep_m91's case, that's a data insertion to Cassandra; in my case is was accessing an RDS instance). The second Lambda function lives outside the VPC, so I could hook it up to the SQS queue. I then had the second Lambda function call the first, using the information found this this StackOverflow Q&A answer. Note, the linked question has both node.js and Python examples in the answers.
This will effectively double the cost of making a function call, since each call results in two function executions. However, for my situation, the volume is so low it won't make a real difference.
To clarify a point above about a "wide open" security group, the group set on the endpoint needs to allow inbound access to SQS from your lambda function.
I created a security group for my endpoint that only opened 443 to my lambda's security group.