Accessing your cluster or replication group

Sign in to the Amazon Web Services Management Console and open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/ec2/.

In the navigation pane, under Network & Security, choose Security Groups.

From the list of security groups, choose the security group for your Amazon VPC. Unless you created a security group for ElastiCache use, this security group will be named default.

Choose the Inbound tab, and then do the following:

1. Choose Edit.

2. Choose Add rule.

3. In the Type column, choose Custom TCP rule.

4. In the Port range box, type the port number for your cluster node. This number must be the same one that you specified when you launched the cluster. The default port for Redis is 6379.

5. In the Source box, choose Anywhere which has the port range (0.0.0.0/0) so that any Amazon EC2 instance that you launch within your Amazon VPC can connect to your ElastiCache nodes.

   Important

   Opening up the ElastiCache cluster to 0.0.0.0/0 does not expose the cluster to the Internet because it has no public IP address and therefore cannot be accessed from outside the VPC. However, the default security group may be applied to other Amazon EC2 instances in the customer’s account, and those instances may have a public IP address. If they happen to be running something on the default port, then that service could be exposed unintentionally. Therefore, we recommend creating a VPC Security Group that will be used exclusively by ElastiCache. For more information, see Custom Security Groups.

6. Choose Save.

Create a NAT instance in the same VPC as your cache cluster but in a public subnet.

By default, the VPC wizard will launch a cache.m1.small node type. You should select a node size based on your needs. You must use EC2 NAT AMI to be able to access ElastiCache from outside Amazon.

For information about creating a NAT instance, see NAT Instances in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

Create security group rules for the cache cluster and NAT instance.

The NAT instance security group and the cluster instance should have the following rules:

Validate the rules.

Add an iptables rule to the NAT instance.

An iptables rule must be added to the NAT table for each node in the cluster to forward the cache port from the NAT instance to the cluster node. An example might look like the following:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 6379 -j DNAT --to 10.0.1.230:6379

The port number must be unique for each node in the cluster. For example, if working with a three node Redis cluster using ports 6379 - 6381, the rules would look like the following:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 6379 -j DNAT --to 10.0.1.230:6379
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 6380 -j DNAT --to 10.0.1.231:6379
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 6381 -j DNAT --to 10.0.1.232:6379

Confirm that the trusted client is able to connect to the cluster.

The trusted client should connect to the EIP associated with the NAT instance and the cluster port corresponding to the appropriate cluster node. For example, the connection string for PHP might look like the following:

redis->connect( '203.0.113.73', 6379 );
redis->connect( '203.0.113.73', 6380 );
redis->connect( '203.0.113.73', 6381 );

A telnet client can also be used to verify the connection. For example:

telnet 203.0.113.73 6379
telnet 203.0.113.73 6380
telnet 203.0.113.73 6381

Save the iptables configuration.

Save the rules after you test and verify them. If you are using a Redhat-based Linux distribution (like Amazon Linux), run the following command:

service iptables save