Amazon RDS – Connecting Using SSH Client

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I have created an Amazon RDS instance and I want to connect to it using an SSH client (puTTY).

I am following this document:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon RDS console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/rds/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Databases, and then choose the RDS Custom DB instance to which you want to connect.

  3. Choose Configuration.

  4. Note the Resource ID value. For example, the resource ID might be db-ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRS0123456.

  5. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  6. In the navigation pane, choose Instances.

  7. Find the name of your EC2 instance, and choose the instance ID associated with it. For example, the EC2 instance ID might be i-abcdefghijklm01234.

I am confused, because I cannot see any EC2 instance which is created for the RDS instance. Am I supposed to created an additional EC2 instance here, to connect to the RDS instance?

Note: I am able to connect to the RDS using a SQL client (MySQL Workbench). Here I am trying to connect to the server using a SSH client.

Best Answer

The "Classic" RDS and Aurora database instances don't provide shell (SSH) access. You can only access the database - MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc - over the appropriate port, e.g. 3306 for MySQL.

The document you're referring to is about RDS Custom databases - that's a new type of RDS only available for Oracle and for SQL Server, not for MySQL at the moment.

Hence if your RDS is MySQL then by definition it's not RDS Custom but instead a classic RDS or Aurora and you won't have SSH access.

What do you need SSH access for anyway? All the settings can be customised through RDS Option Groups or online through the MySQL console.

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