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Authentication

In the last section, you got a basic overview of the architecture, including learning that there is a variety of infrastructure deployed across multiple AWS accounts. In this section, you'll learn about authenticating and connecting to all the resources in your AWS accounts:

  • Set up initial access: If this is your first time using this infrastructure—that is, if Gruntwork just deployed and handed over the Reference Architecture to you—go through this section first!

  • Authenticate to the AWS Web Console: Learn how to access each of your AWS accounts using a web browser. Since all the infrastructure is managed as code, you shouldn't be making many changes from the web console, but it's still useful for debugging, troubleshooting, learning, and looking at metrics, and logs.

  • Authenticate to AWS via the CLI: Learn how to access each of your AWS accounts from the command line. You'll need this to work with CLI tools such as the aws, terraform, terragrunt, and packer.

  • Authenticate to the VPN server: Just about all of the infrastructure is deployed in private subnets, so it is not accessible directly from the public Internet. To be able to SSH to an EC2 instance or connect to a database, you'll first need to get "inside" the networking by connecting to the VPN server.

  • Authenticate to EC2 Instances via SSH: If you need to debug something on an EC2 instance, you'll need to connect over SSH.