Managing your cloud resources with OpenStack: Difference between revisions

You can define multiple security groups and a VM can belong to more than one security group. When deciding on how to manage your security groups and rules, think carefully about what needs to be accessed and who needs to access it. Strive to minimize the IP addresses and ports in your Ingress rules. For example, if you will always be connecting to your VM via SSH from the same computer with a static IP it makes sense to allow SSH access only from that IP. To specify the allowed IP or IP range use the [[OpenStack#Using_CIDR_rules|CIDR]] box (use this web based tool for converting [http://www.ipaddressguide.com/cidr IP ranges to CIDR] rules). Further, if you only need to connect to one VM via SSH from the outside and then can use that as a gateway to any other Cloud VMs, it makes sense to put the SSH rule in a separate security group and add that group only to the gateway VM. However, you will also need to ensure your SSH keys are configured correctly to allow you to use SSH between VMs (see [[SSH Keys]]). In addition to CIDR, security rules can be limited within a project using security groups. For example, you can configure a security rule for a VM in your project running a MySQL Database to be accessible form other VMs in the default security group.

The security groups a VM belongs to can be chosen when it is created on the ''Launch Instance'' screen under the ''Access & Security'' tab, or after the VM has been launched by selecting ''Edit Security Groups'' form the drop down menu of actions for the VM on the ''Project->Compute->Instances'' page.