RDS access via kubernetes as jump host

Sometimes there is a need to connect to RDS in private VPC subnet having an access to EKS. It can be achieved with help of socket container deployed on top of k8s and setting up the tunnel with help of kubectl port-forward

Deploy socat pod

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  labels:
    run: rds-postgres-relay
  name: rds-postgres-relay
spec:
  containers:
    - name: rds-socat
      image: alpine/socat:latest
      args:
        - "TCP-LISTEN:5432,fork"
        - "TCP:private-rds.c1xfw13.eu-central-1.rds.amazonaws.com:5432"
      ports:
        - containerPort: 5432
          name: postgres
          protocol: TCP

Set up tunnel:

kubectl port-forward pod/rds-postgres-relay 45432:5432
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:45432 -> 5432
Forwarding from [::1]:45432 -> 5432
Handling connection for 45432

Configure pgAdmin to use 127.0.0.1:45432