You put your database in a private subnet. Good luck connecting to it.

Hey 👋🏽

Hope you had a great Christmas with your loved ones 🎄

Tobi and I spent a few days in Berlin consulting with a startup, then caught the last sunny days in Munich before winter really hits.

This week: how to actually connect to your RDS database in a private subnet.

Every AWS certification tells you to put databases in private subnets. Great advice. But nobody explains what happens when you need to run a query and realize... you can't reach it from your laptop.

I've seen senior developers stuck on this. It's one of those gaps between exam knowledge and real-world work.

You'll need access when you want to:

• Inspect your data
• Test queries
• Run migrations

We recorded this as a YouTube video if you'd rather watch than read:

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News

First, a few AWS updates worth knowing.

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Our Favrouite: SES now has an email validation API. I'd have needed this on one of my past projects.

Remember: If you let customers send emails, you'll attract spammers. Validating addresses before they hit your system saves you from bounces, complaints, and a trashed sender reputation.

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Deep Dive

Now for the main event.

📚 This Week's Deep Dive The Problem: Your Database Is Unreachable Every AWS certification teaches you to put databases in private subnets. That's the right call for security. But when you need to run a query, you realize nobody explained how to actually reach it. Your RDS instance has no public IP. Your laptop sits outside the VPC. There's no path. The Solution: EC2 Jumphost with Session Manager You need a bridge into the private network. Session Manager gives you that bridge without SSH keys, open ports, or a NAT gateway. The video walks through the full CDK setup, VPC endpoints, and a live demo of the tunnel in action. 🎬 Watch the Full Tutorial → Prefer reading? Read the blog post instead

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That's it for this week. Enjoy the holidays, don't touch prod, and I'll see you in January. 👋🏽

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Sandro & Tobi ✌🏽

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