How to use terraform to setup vpc & bastion box

5 min readJun 11, 2018

If you’re building infrastructure on AWS or GCP you need a sandbox in which to place your toys. That sandbox is called a VPC. It’s one of those lovely acronyms that we in the tech world take for granted.

Join 38,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

Those letters stand for Virtual Private Cloud, one of many networks within your cloud, that serve as a firewall, controlling access to servers, applications and other resources.

1. What is it for?

VPC partitions off your cloud, allowing you to control who gets into what. A VPC typically has a private Zone and a public Zone.

Within your private Zone you’ll have 2 or more private subnets and within your public, you’ll have two or more public subnets. These each sit in different availability zones, or data centers within a region. Having at least two means you can be redundant right from the start.

2. How to setup the VPC

Terraform has some excellent community modules that help you get on the ground running. One of those facilitates creating a VPC for you. When you create your VPC, the main things you want to think about are:

o what region am I building in?
o what az’s do I want to use?
o what network cidr’s to use?

You’ll have important outputs when you build your vpc. In particular the private subnets, public subnets and default security groups, which you will reference over and over in all of your terraform code. That’s because RDS databases, ec2 instances, redis clusters and many other resources sit inside of a subnet.

module "my-vpc" {
  source = "terraform-aws-modules/vpc/aws"

  name = "my-vpc"
  cidr = "10.0.0.0/16"

  azs             = ["us-east-1a","us-east-1b"]
  private_subnets = ["10.0.1.0/24", "10.0.2.0/24"]
  public_subnets  = ["10.0.101.0/24", "10.0.102.0/24"]

  enable_nat_gateway   = true
  single_nat_gateway   = true
  reuse_nat_ips        = false
  enable_vpn_gateway   = false
  enable_dns_hostnames = true

  tags = {
    Terraform   = "true"
    Environment = "dev"
  }
}

Note, this module can do a *lot* more. For example you can attached an unchanging or fixed IP (elastic IP in aws terminology) to the NAT device. This is useful so that your application appears to be coming from a single box all the time. It allows upstream providers, APIs and other integrations to whitelist you, allows your application and servers to tie into those services predictably and cleanly.

Also note that we created some nice tags. These tags become more and more important as you automate more of your infrastructure, because you will dig through the dashboard from time to time and can easily figure out what is what. You can also use a tag such as “monitoring = yes” to filter for resources that your monitoring system should tie into.

3. How to add the bastion

You want to deploy all servers in private subnets. That’s because the internet is a dangerous place these days. Everything and I mean everything. From there you provide only two ways to reach those resources. A loac balancer fronts your applications, opening ports 80, 443 or other relavant ports. And a jump box fronts your ssh access.

Place the bastion box in your PUBLIC subnet, so that you can reach it from the outside internet.

Again we’re using an amazing community terraform module, which also implements another cool feature for us. Note we deploy mykey onto the box. Think of this as your master key. But you may want to provide other users access to these machaines. In that case, simply place their public keys into my-public-keys-bucket.

Terraform will automatically deploy a key copying job onto this box via user-data script. The job will run via cron every 15 minutes, and copy (sync rather) public keys into the authorized keys file. This will allow you to add/remove users easily.

There are of course many more sophisticated networks which would require more nuanced user control, but this method is great for starters. :)

module "my-bastion" {
  source                      = "github.com/terraform-community-modules/tf_aws_bastion_s3_keys"
  instance_type               = "t2.micro"
  ami                         = "ami-976152f2"
  region                      = "us-east-1"
  key_name                    = "mykey"
  iam_instance_profile        = "s3_readonly"
  s3_bucket_name              = "my-public-keys-bucket"
  vpc_id                      = "${module.my-vpc.vpc_id}"
  subnet_ids                  = "${module.my-vpc.public_subnets}"
  keys_update_frequency       = "*/15 * * * *"
  additional_user_data_script = "date"
  name  = "my-bastion"
  associate_public_ip_address = true
  ssh_user = "ec2-user"
}

# allow ssh coming from bastion to boxes in vpc
#
resource "aws_security_group_rule" "allow_ssh" {
  type            = "ingress"
  from_port       = 22
  to_port         = 22
  protocol        = "tcp"
  security_group_id = "${module.my-vpc.default_security_group_id}"
  source_security_group_id = "${module.my-bastion.security_group_id}" 
}

4. Add an EC2 instance

Now that we have a bastion box in the public subnet, we can use it as a jump box to resources sitting in the private subnets.

Let’s add an ec2 instance in one of our private subnets first. Then in the test section, you can actually reach those boxes by configuring your ssh config.

Here’s the code to create an ec2 instance. Create a file testbox.tf and add these lines. Then do the usual “$ terraform plan && terraform apply”

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-976152f2"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  subnet_id = "${module.my-vpc.public_subnets}"
  key_name = "mykey"
}

5. Testing

In order to test, you’ll need to edit your local ssh config file. This sits in ~/.ssh/config and defines names you can use on your local machine, to hit resources out there on the internet via ssh. Each definition includes a host, an ssh key and a user.

Below we define our bastion box. With that saved to our ssh config file, we can do “$ ssh bastion” and login to it without any password. Excellent!

The second section is even cooler. Remember that our testbox sits in a private subnet, so there is no route to it from the internet at all. Even if we changed it’s security group to allow all ports from all source IPs, it would still not be reachable. 10.0.1.19 is not an internet IP, it is one only defined within the world of our private subnet.

The second section defines how to use bastion as a proxy to reach the testbox. Once that is added to our ssh config file, we can do “$ ssh testbox” and magically reach it in one hop, by using the bastion as a proxy.

Host bastion
   Hostname ec2-22-205-135-133.compute-1.amazonaws.com
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/mykey.pem
   User ec2-user
   ForwardAgent yes


Host testbox
   Hostname 10.0.1.19
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/mykey.pem
   User ec2-user
   ProxyCommand ssh bastion -W %h:%p

Get more. Grab our exclusive monthly Scalable Startups. We share tips and special content. Our latest Why I don’t work with recruiters

Originally published at Scalable Startups.