Admin
1
I made and deployed my Django application in AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It has a connection to a Postgres DB in RDS, through the EBS console.
When I click configuration -> network in EBS, I see: "This environment is not part of a VPC."
How can I make it a part of a VPC? Thanks!
NOTE: very new to this ;)
You have to recreate the Elastic Beanstalk environment and pick the VPC during the creation. It is not possible to move an existing environment into a VPC.
But, unless you have access to EC2-Classic, the EC2 servers that were launched are already be in a VPC. They are just in the default VPC. But as far as Elastic Beanstalk is concerned, it seems oblivious to this.
I am not sure if there are any features that are exclusively available to VPC environments. My suggestion is to try to use your current environment, and if you happen to recreate the environment later for some other reason, then you can try picking a VPC and see if it offers anything new.
As already explained by @stefansundin you can't move existing EB into a custom VPC. You have to create new one.
These are general steps to consider:
Create a custom VPC with public and private subnets as described in the docs: VPC with public and private subnets (NAT). NAT is needed for instances and rds in private subnet to communicate with internet, but no inbound internet traffic will be allowed. This ensures that your instances and rds are not accessible from the outside.
Create new RDS, external to EB. This is good practice as otherwise the lifetime of your RDS is coupled with EB environment. Starting point is the following AWS documentation: Launching and connecting to an external Amazon RDS instance in a default VPC
Create new EB environment and ensure to customize its settings to use the VPC. Pass the RDS endpoint to the EB instances using environmental variables. Depending on how you want to handle password to the RDS, there are few options, starting from using environmental variables (low security) through SSM Parameter Store (free) or AWS Secrets Manager (not free).
Setting this all up correctly can be difficult for someone new to AWS. But with patience and practice it can be done. Thus, I would recommend with starting with default VPC, as you have now. Then once you are comfortable with how to work with external RDS, think on creating custom VPC as described.
