Bastion host software

Bastion servers also provide RDP and SSH connectivity to the workloads sitting behind the bastion, as well as further inside the network. Azure Bastion supports manual host scaling. Increasing the number of host instances lets Azure Bastion manage more concurrent sessions. Decreasing the number of instances decreases the number of concurrent supported sessions. Azure Bastion supports up to 50 host instances. For more information, see the Configuration settings article.

Azure Bastion pricing involves a combination of hourly pricing based on SKU, scale units, and data transfer rates. Pricing information can be found on the Pricing page. For frequently asked questions, see the Bastion FAQ. Skip to main content. Next, create a security group to be applied to your bastion host.

Inbound and outbound traffic must be restricted at the protocol level as much as possible. You definitely want to avoid allowing wide open access 0. This does not pose a problem when you are trying to connect to your bastion host from your local machine, as you can easily store the private key locally. However, once you have connected to your bastion host, logging in to your private instances from the bastion would require having their private keys on the bastion.

As you will probably already know and if not, then take careful note now , storing private keys on remote instances is not a good security practice. Both of these solutions eliminate the need for storing private keys on the bastion host. As with all cloud deployments, you should always consider the resiliency and high availability of your services. With this in mind, I recommend deploying a bastion within each public Availability Zone that you are using. As a side note related to bastion hosts, there are a couple of new ways to supplement your security posture.

First, you can skip bastion hosts altogether by using Session Manager part of AWS Systems Manager in order to securely connect to your private instances in your virtual private cloud VPC without needing an intermediary bastion host or any of its security-related dependencies, such as key pairs assigned to the instances.

Second, by using EC2 Instance Connect you can simplify one of the management aspects of your bastion hosts. Basically, you can forget about having to associate a key pair to your bastion host instance, nor do you have to add permanent user keys to your authorized keys.

Instead, you can now push keys for short periods of time and use IAM policies to restrict access as you see fit. This reduces your compliance and audit footprint as well, which is always a good thing. In general, the implementation would involve using Instance Connect together with an AWS Lambda function to automate your SG group config, having it allow access from the predetermined IP address range of the Instance Connect service.

A NAT instance, however, allows your private instances outgoing connectivity to the internet while at the same time blocking inbound traffic from the internet. Many people configure their NAT instances to allow private instances to access the internet for important operating system updates.

At the top of the Subnets page, select Create a Bastion to return to the Bastion configuration page. Create a new public IP address.

The public IP address must be in the same region as the Bastion resource you are creating. This IP address does not have anything to do with any of the VMs that you want to connect to. It's the public IP address for the Bastion host resource.

If you aren't using the public IP address for anything else, you can disassociate it from your VM. To disassociate a public IP address from your VM, use the following steps:. Navigate to your virtual machine and select Networking. After you disassociate the IP address, you can delete the public IP address resource. To delete the public IP address resource, navigate to the resource group and locate the IP address resource you want to delete. Then, select Delete to delete the resource.

In the Azure portal , navigate to the virtual machine that you want to connect to. On the Overview page, select Connect , then select Bastion from the dropdown. Because Bastion was provisioned for the virtual network, the Bastion tab is active by default. Select Use Bastion. On the Connect using Azure Bastion page, enter the username and password for your virtual machine, then select Connect. If you're not going to continue to use this application, delete your resources using the following steps:.

In this tutorial, you created a Bastion host and associated it to a virtual network. You then removed the public IP address from a VM and connected to it. To do so, see:. Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Contents Exit focus mode.