Securing your VPC with bastion hosts

The use of bastion hosts (or jump boxes) is used to provide secure access to EC2 instances located in the private and public subnets of your virtual private cloud (VPC). These bastion hosts (you can have one or multiple hosts deployed for redundancy) can be used as management servers and are designed to allow you to remotely connect to them via SSH or RDP protocols. Once you have established connectivity to your bastion hosts, you can then log onto backend EC2 instances acting as web or application servers.

Bastion hosts are EC2 instances that do not host any unnecessary applications, other than those required to allow connections to backend EC2 instances. These servers are hardened and secured to reduce attack surfaces and thus minimize the chances of penetration. However, you still need to manage these instances as you would any other application or web server. The onus is on you to ensure that the EC2 instances are highly secured, patched...