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Access to EC2 in a private subnet from local machine

Steps to connect to EC2 instances in a private subnet:​

** Prerequisites **

  1. Ensure you have installed AWS CLI v2;

  2. Ensure you have installed AWS Session manager plugin;

If using AWS IAM user credentials:​

Run the following command to configure your AWS credentials:

AWS configure:​

** When prompted, provide the credentials required: **

  1. Access key: your access key;

  2. Secret access key: your secret key;

  3. Region: eu-west-2;

  4. Output format: json;

If using credentials from AWS SSO:​

If you already have an AWS account and you use AWS SSO:

  1. Go to the SSO portal and navigate to the account in which the EC2 instance is hosted;

AWS SSO portal

  1. Click on ‘Command line or programmatic access’;

Credentials

  1. Copy your credentials (AWS Option 2 in screenshot above) and paste them in your aws credentials file (Usually located at the following path: Users -> your username -> .aws -> credentials);

  2. Alternatively(AWS Option 1 in screenshot above), copy the EXPORT commands to set up the credentials locally in your CLI;

Once the above is completed, please run the following command, where INSTANCE-ID is the EC2 instance ID as it appears in AWS console:

aws ssm start-session --target INSTANCE-ID --document-name
AWS-StartPortForwarding Session --[REDACTED]
"localPortNumber=[REDACTED],portNumber=[REDACTED]"
Starting session with SessionId: xpress-db-server-remote-user-[REDACTED]
Port opened for sessionId xpress-db-server-remote-user-[REDACTED]
Connection accepted for session xpress-db-server-remote-user-[REDACTED]

The above command will start a port forwarding session. To connect to your EC2 instance, go to your Remote Desktop software that you usually use and use localhost:55678 as the computer name.

You will then be prompted to enter your Windows machine credentials.