SSH is yet another example of an ancient technology that is still in wide use today. It may very well be that learning a couple of SSH tricks is more profitable in the long run than mastering a dozen Cloud Native tools destined to become deprecated next quarter.

One of my favorite parts of this technology is SSH Tunnels. With nothing but standard tools and often using just a single command, you can achieve the following:

  • Access internal VPC endpoints through a public-facing EC2 instance.
  • Open a port from the localhost of a development VM in the host’s browser.
  • Expose any local server from a home/private network to the outside world.

And more 😍

  • SpaceCadet2000@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    ssh tunneling can be very useful for testing or one-shot things where you quickly need access to a service that’s not directly reachable, but I wouldn’t use it as a permanent solution for anything. You quickly run into problems like:

    • TLS certificates don’t work, so you get into the habit of clicking through security warnings or turning of TLS validation altogether.
    • Virtual hosts don’t work
    • Port conflicts when you want to access the same type of service on different remote machines, so you have to remap them and remember things like: localhost:8080 is foo:80 and localhost:8081 is bar:80
    • If it’s not your infrastructure (i.e. you are an employee in a larger company), you are probably bypassing all kinds of security rules by exposing a service and your security guys will not be too happy about it if they find out.