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This article was adapted from part of my new Pluralsight course, “Connecting On-prem Resources to your AWS Infrastructure.”

Do you sometimes need to connect to resources you’ve got running on Amazon Web Services? Accessing your public EC2 instances using SSH and encrypting your S3 data is, for all intents and purposes, secure enough. But what about getting into a back-end RDS database instance or working with AWS-based data that’s not public? There are all kinds of reasons why admins keep such resources out of reach of the general public. But if you can’t get at them when you need, what good are they likely to do you?

So you’ll need to find a safe and reliable way around the ACLs and security groups protecting your stuff. One solution I cover in my “Connecting On-prem Resources to your AWS Infrastructure” course on Pluralsight is Direct Connect. But if Direct Connect’s price tag is a budget-buster for your company, then some kind of VPN tunnel might do the trick.

What’s a Virtual Private Network?

They just sent an email that the fixed license for OpenVPN Access Server is raising from $180/yr for 10 concurrent licenses to $750/yr. Which is over 400% more. This seems excessive. We are an MSP and use OpenVPN for quite a few clients, we will not be able to justify this sort of cost when most of our firewalls offer perpetual licenses for.

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are often used to allow otherwise restricted network activity or anonymous browsing. But that’s not what this article is about.

Access Server Subscription entitles the use of (1) subscription license key on a single server or across multiple servers. Once an activated key expires or becomes invalid, the concurrency limit on our software product will revert to demonstration mode, which allows a maximum of two (2) concurrent users to be connected to your server.
Access Server subscriptions are based on the needed number of simultaneous VPN connections. While others charge based on the number of CPU cores or the bandwidth of the server, OpenVPN does not.

A VPN is a point-to-point connection that lets you move data securely between two sites across a public network. Effectively, a tunnel can be designed to combine two geographically separated private sites into one single private network. In our context, that would mean connecting your local office network with the AWS VPC that’s hosting your private resources.

There are two ways to do this:

A managed VPN Connection built on top of an AWS Virtual Private Gateway
Using your own VPN.

This article will focus on the do it yourself method.

The OpenVPN Access Server

As the name suggests, OpenVPN is an open source project, and you’re always able to download the free community edition and set things up on your own VPN server. But the OpenVPN company also provides a purpose-built OpenVPN Access Server as an EC2 AMI which comes out of the box with AWS-friendly integration and automated configuration tools.

From what I can see, launching the AMI within your AWS VPC and opening it up for controlled remote connections has pretty much become the “right” way to get this job done.

What does it cost? If you’re only testing things out and don’t plan to access the VPN using more than two connections at a time, then the AMI itself is free. You’ll still be on the hook for the regular costs of an EC2 instance, but if your account is still eligible for the Free Tier, then you can get that for free, too.

Once you put your VPN into active production, the license you purchase will depend on how many concurrent connections you’ll need. This page has the details you’ll need.

Here’s what we’re going to do in this guide:

Select, provision, and launch an Ubuntu AMI with OpenVPN Access Server pre-installed into my VPC
Access the server using SSH and configure the VPN
Set up an admin user
Set up a local machine as an OpenVPN client and connect to a private instance in my AWS VPC

Ready?

Launching an OpenVPN Access Server

From the EC2 dashboard — and making sure we’re in the right AWS region — launch an instance to act as our VPN server. Rather than using one of the Quick Start AMIs, I’ll click on the AWS Marketplace tab and search for “openvpn access server”. OpenVPN provides a number of official images that are tied to licenses offering escalating numbers of connected clients.

I’m going to go with this Ubuntu image that works through a “Bring Your Own License” arrangement. As I wrote earlier, we won’t actually need a license for what we’re going to be doing.

Selecting the AMI opens a popup telling us how much this image will cost us per hour using various instance types and EBS storage choices. Those are only regular AWS infrastructure costs, however, and don’t include license fees.

When it comes to instance type, I’ll downgrade to a t2.micro to keep it within the free tier. A busy production server might require a bit more power.

Because I’m going to want to start up a second instance in the same subnet in a few minutes, I’ll select, say, “us-east-1b” from the Configure Instance Details page, and make a note for later.

Now the Security Group page is where the OpenVPN AMI settings really shine. We’re presented with a security group that opens up everything we’ll need. Port 22 is for SSH traffic into the server, 943 is the port we’ll use to access the admin GUI, 443 is TLS-encrypted HTTP traffic, and OpenVPN will listen for incoming client connections on port 1194.

Note: If practical, it would normally be a good idea to tighten those rules so only requests from valid company IP address ranges are accepted, but this will be fine for short-term testing.

From here, I’ll review my settings, confirm that I’ve got the listed SSH encryption key, and pull the trigger.

Once the instance is launched, I’ll be shown important login information — including the fact that the user account we’ll use to SSH into the server is called openvpnas — and a Quick Start guide. I’ll also receive an email containing links to the same information.

Back in the EC2 instances console, while the new machine finishes booting, we’re shown our public IP address. If we would ever need to reboot the instance, there’s no guarantee that we’d get that same IP again, which could cause a reasonable amount of mayhem. So it’s a good idea to assign the instance an Elastic IP.

To do that, I’ll click Elastic IPs and then Allocate new address. Note the new address and close the page. Now, with that address selected, click Actions, and “Associate Address”. I’ll click once in the Instance box and my OpenVPN instance — with its helpful tag — is listed. I only need to select it, click “Associate” and I’m done. From now on, that will be the permanent public IP for accessing our server.

Accessing the server

I’ll paste the public IP address into the terminal as part of my SSH command that calls the key pair I set for this instance.

If you’re accessing from a Windows or macOS machine, things might work a bit differently, but the documentation will give you all the help you’ll need.

Before I leave the Instances console, however, I’ll perform one more important function. With the OpenVPN instance selected, I’ll click Actions and then Networking and then “Change Source/Dest checking”. I’ll make sure that checking is disabled. Nothing much will be possible unless I do this.

Now over to my SSH session. As soon as it begins, I’m confronted by the OpenVPN EULA license agreement, and then the setup wizard. If you need to change a setting later you can always run the wizard again using this command:

Most of the wizard’s defaults will work fine, but it’s worth quickly explaining what’s happening. Here are the questions and some color commentary where necessary:

When the wizard completes, I’m shown some connection information and advised to install the network time daemon NTP. That won’t be necessary on this Ubuntu box, as it’s already installed and running by default.

As I mentioned earli

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