Accessing an Amazon RDS MySQL instance from an IronWorker instance

Question

We're using IronWorkers from http://www.iron.io/ to do some heavy image and PDF processing.

I want to connect an IronWorker instance to a RDS MySQL database on our Amazon AWS account, so that the our code running on the IronWorker can directly make chances in this database.

I'm not too sure how to go about this, as we have a few technical issues to work around.

My understanding is that IronWorkers that get launched won't be in the RDS instance's security group, and would be blocked from accessing our RDS MySQL instance. It won't be possible to create a security group, by creating an CIDR/IP entry either, since we don't know what the IP address for the launched server is going to be.

Another approach would be to somehow get the .pem file on the launched instance, and configure the MySQL connection to use a PEM file through SSH, but I'm not too convinced that it's the most secure way to go about achieving a connection.

Does anyone know of any means a direct connection can be made from an IronWorker instance to a MySQL RDS instance?

Answer 1

There's a tricky way to get around this by finding the internal IP of your RDS instance then using that instead of the dns entry AWS gives you, example:

$ ping myserverabcdefg.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com PING ec2-X-XX-XXX-X.compute-1.amazonaws.com (10.111.222.33) 56(84) bytes of data.

Then add a dns entry using that internal host and and use the new dns entry in your workers.

Let us know how that works.