I am having an Amazon RDS Postgres instance which resides in the default VPC.
To connect to it, i am using different EC2 instances (Java Spring Boot and NodeJs) running in ElasticBeanstalk. These instances also reside in the default VPC.
Do these EC2 instances connect to/query the RDS instance through the internet or the calls do not leave the AWS Network?
If they leave the AWS network and the calls go through the internet, is creating a VPC endpoint the right solution? Or my whole understanding is incorrect.
Thanks a lot for your help.
2 Answers
Do these EC2 instances connect to/query the RDS instance through the internet or the calls do not leave the AWS Network?
The DNS of the RDS endpoint will resolve to private IP address when used from within VPC. So communication is private, even if you use public subnets or set your RDS instance as publicly available. However, for connection from outside of AWS, the RDS endpoint will resolve to public IP address if the db instance is publicly available.
If they leave the AWS network and the calls go through the internet, is creating a VPC endpoint the right solution?
There is no VPC endpoint for RDS client connections, only for management actions (creating db-instance, termination, etc). In contrast, Aurora Serverless has Data API with corresponding VPC endpoint.
To secure your DB-Instances communications you need to be sure at least about the following:
- locate your RD in private subnet (route table does not contain default outbound route to internet gateway).
- RDS security group just accept traffic inbound only from instances security group/groups on TCP port for PostgreSQL which is usually 5432.
In this case Traffice to RDS will go localy in your vpc, for vpc endpoints it can be used to access RDS API operations privatly which is not your case (you just need to connect your app to DB using connection string)