Unable to Access RDS Database from Elastic Beanstalk Application

Hey everyone,

I ran into a bit of an issue today where I was unable to access my RDS SQL Express instance from my .NET Elastic Beanstalk instance. I was receiving the following error:

The server was not found or was not accessible.

The solution turned out to be fairly simply thanks to this StackOverflow post: http://stackoverflow.com/a/33207022/522859

Get your server instance security group:
– Log into AWS
– Navigate to elastic beanstalk
– Open your application instance
– Open configuration
– Open instances
– Find “server” on the page and copy the value in the “EC2 security groups” field

Add your server instance security group to your rds rules:
– Navigate to the RDS Dashboard
– Open your RDS instance
– Click on view details (left hand side or top)
– Find Security and Network
– Click on the rds-launch-wizard under security groups
– Click on inbound rules (very bottom currently)
– Add a new inbound rule with the copied security group as the source