VPN to AWS to access private RDS instance

amazon-vpcamazon-web-services

I'm trying to determine if it's possible to grant users VPN access into my VPC. I keep finding solutions to attach a VPN to my VPC, but I'd like for the VPC to be the main network that the VPN is driven by, rather than requiring an external VPN provider to tap into AWS. Is something like this possible or am I way off point?

My end game objective is to allow developers to VPN into the private RDS instances.

Best Answer

Yes, you can setup a PC-based VPN into your VPC. (Windows, Mac, Linux)

It's slightly more complicated than say adding a VPN to a firewall oddly, but with some googling you can get it.

The product you're looking for is "Client VPN Endpoint" and would be setup to connect to a specific VPC.

A good overview and instructions are here:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpn/latest/clientvpn-admin/how-it-works.html

I had to hack our Client VPN to work slightly, as we use g-suite SSO, and that required a slight mod not available via the GUI. See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63151685/aws-vpn-using-federated-login-with-google-idp-app-not-configured-for-user/63590967#63590967

Once we did that, it works fine.

Some of the other comments mentioned making the RDS instance publically available - from a security standpoint, while obscurity is no security, neither is just making everything public and locking down passwords.

Accessing your RDS only via a VPN is a much better way to go; or you could go to a "Bastion" server which is a machine you connect to (usually SSH CLI, but in principal could be a GUI) and then IT connects to the RDS instance. That's a PITA as you have to install all of your developer tools on it - but is in theory even more secure.

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