Accessing AWS RDS From Outside the VPC with no public access

Question

I have a MySQL database on Amazon RDS. When I created this database I unselected the "public access" option which can not be changed after creating the database. This means that my database instance can only be accessed from inside the VPC.

So now I would like to access the database in my local computer with setting the MySQL host with a EC2 VPS I have inside the network with access to the database. I want this server to act as my MySQL server so I can access it locally.

Answer 1

I just had to do this same thing. The process is to set up an SSH tunnel through the EC2 instance to the database. I wrote a post about the whole process that should be helpful

Answer 2

There's a couple of options -

Take a snapshot of the database and spin up a new copy that does allow public access. You can then use the security groups to only allow access from your ip - that way you have the benefit of the non public access security plus the ease of access from your machine.

If you don't want to do that, as datasage mentions your other option is to use an ssh tunnel - this will mean creating an ec2 instance in the same vpc that CAN access the rds, then using putty or your favourite ssh client to tunnel traffic through the 'bastion' ec2 instance to your database. This has the added layer of security but it's also more work to manage, depending on your familiarity with ssh. Not to mention the added cost of the ec2 instance.