Setting up client access over private IP address to MySQL on Compute Engine

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This tutorial walks you through the process of running a MySQL database on a private network in Google Cloud to allow secure, remote access to the database by using Compute Engine.

Use this tutorial if you want to install your own MySQL database on Compute Engine, but want to restrict access to only authorized MySQL clients also running on Compute Engine. You might want to manage your own MySQL instance instead of using the managed service, due to cross-region instances, advanced usage of parameters, and specific performance needs.

This tutorial describes how to configure your MySQL server app to accept remote traffic from a MySQL client that is installed on a Compute Engine instance on the same private network.

For information about how to choose the right MySQL deployment option, see How to install MySQL on Compute Engine.

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with the following:

• Basic Linux commands
• Ubuntu-server 18.04
• MySQL 5.7
• Compute Engine

Architecture

In this tutorial, you deploy two Compute Engine instances. One instance is the server and the other instance is the client as depicted in the following diagram:

Objectives

• Create a Compute Engine instance and install MySQL server.
• Create a Compute Engine instance and install MySQL client.
• Configure MySQL server for remote access.
• Remove public access to the MySQL server.
• Connect remotely to MySQL.
• Create a VPC Service Controls firewall rule.

Costs

In this document, you use the following billable components of Google Cloud:

• Compute Engine
• Cloud Storage

To generate a cost estimate based on your projected usage, use the pricing calculator. New Google Cloud users might be eligible for a free trial.

Before you begin

1. Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

2. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

3. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

4. Enable the Compute Engine API.

   Enable the API

5. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

6. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

7. Enable the Compute Engine API.

   Enable the API

When you finish this tutorial, you can avoid continued billing by deleting the resources you created. See Cleaning up for more detail.

Creating Compute Engine instances

Create two instances for MySQL—a client and a server instance.

Create a Compute Engine client instance

Create a Compute Engine instance. Configure the instance as follows:

• Name the instance my-client.
• Set the --zone flag to the zone in which you want to create your instance.
• Set the --image-project flag to ubuntu-os-cloud.
• Set the --image-family flag to ubuntu-1804-lts.
• Set the --scopes flag to https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform.

gcloud compute instances create my-client --zone=ZONE --image-project=ubuntu-os-cloud --image-family=ubuntu-1804-lts --scopes=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform

Create a Compute Engine server instance

Create a Compute Engine instance. Configure the instance as follows:

• Name the instance my-server.
• Set the --zone flag to the zone in which you want to create your instance.
• Set the --image-project flag to ubuntu-os-cloud.
• Set the --image-family flag to ubuntu-1804-lts.
• Set the --scopes flag to https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform.

gcloud compute instances create my-server --zone=ZONE --image-project=ubuntu-os-cloud --image-family=ubuntu-1804-lts --scopes=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform

Installing MySQL client

The following steps describe how to install MySQL on a Compute Engine instance.

1. To connect to the my-client instance, use the ssh command.
2. Update the apt-get package manager.

   sudo apt-get update
   

   Note: If you receive an error Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock, wait another minute for the boot processes to complete and try again.
3. Install the MySQL client package.

   sudo apt-get -y install mysql-client-5.7

Installing MySQL server

The following steps describe how to install MySQL on a Compute Engine instance.

1. To connect to the my-server instance, use the ssh command.
2. Update the apt-get package manager.

   sudo apt-get update
   

   Note: If you receive an error, "Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock'", wait another minute for the boot processes to complete and try again.
3. Install the MySQL server package.

   sudo apt-get -y install mysql-server-5.7

Improve MySQL installation security

You must establish a root password for MySQL and perform basic security maintenance on your MySQL server configuration. For more information, see the MySQL documentation for mysql_secure_installation.

1. In the SSH session to your my-server instance, use the following command to improve the security of your MySQL installation.

   sudo mysql_secure_installation
   

2. Press enter to skip setting up the VALIDATE PASSWORD plugin.

3. Enter a new root password twice.

4. To remove anonymous users, enter Y and press enter.

5. To prevent remote root login, enter Y and press enter.

6. To remove the test database, enter Y and press enter.

7. To reload the privilege tables, enter Y and press enter.

Configuring the MySQL server

Before you can remotely connect to the MySQL server, you need to configure it to listen on its internal IP address. Then, you create a non-root user account for the MySQL client to connect to the server.

All MySQL client commands must include certain command-line flags (for example, to authenticate). The MySQL commands in this section include the following flags: --user for the username, -p for the password, and -e to execute the given statement and immediately quit. For more information, see the MySQL 5.7 command options reference.

1. In Cloud Shell, use SSH to connect to the my-server instance.

2. Update the /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf configuration file with the following information:

   LOCAL_IP=$(curl  http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/instance/network-interfaces/0/ip \
       -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google")
   sudo sed -i "s|bind-address.*|bind-address = $LOCAL_IP|" /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf
   

3. Restart the MySQL service to apply the changes to the running server.

   sudo service mysql restart
   

4. Verify that the server is running locally. Replace [ROOT_PASSWORD] with the MySQL server root password you established in a previous step.

   sudo mysql --user=root -p[ROOT_PASSWORD] -e "show databases"
   

   The output appears similar to the following:

   +--------------------+
   | Database           |
   +--------------------+
   | information_schema |
   | mysql              |
   | performance_schema |
   | sys                |
   +--------------------+
   

Create a MySQL user

Remotely connecting as the root user was disabled with the preceding mysql_secure_installation command. You need to create a new user with the necessary permissions to allow remote connections.

1. In Cloud Shell, create an environment variable for the my-client internal IP address.

   CLIENT_IP=$(gcloud compute instances describe my-client \
       --zone=ZONE \
       --format='value(networkInterfaces[0].networkIP)')
   

2. Create a new MySQL user with a password. Replace [MY_PASSWORD] with your password, [ROOT_PASSWORD] with your MySQL root user password.

   sudo mysql -uroot -p[ROOT_PASSWORD] \
       -e "CREATE USER 'TESTUSER'@'${CLIENT_IP}' IDENTIFIED BY '[MY_PASSWORD]';"
   

3. Grant the new MySQL user permission to log on to the server from the internal IP address of my-client.

   sudo mysql -uroot -p[ROOT_PASSWORD] -e \
       "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'TESTUSER'@'${CLIENT_IP}' \
       IDENTIFIED BY '[MY_PASSWORD]';"
   

Remove the external IP address for my-server

The my-server instance doesn't need an external IP address because the client can access my-server through an internal IP address.

• To remove the external IP address, update the configuration settings in Cloud Shell. Replace [ZONE] with your Google Cloud zone.

  gcloud compute instances delete-access-config my-server \
      --access-config-name "external-nat" \
      --zone="ZONE"
  

Verifying remote access from client to server instance

The following steps describe how to connect to the MySQL server on my-server from your my-client instance.

1. In Cloud Shell, use SSH to connect to my-client instance.

2. Test your connection by listing the databases.

   sudo mysql --host=my-server --user=TESTUSER \
       --password=[MY_PASSWORD] -e "SHOW DATABASES;"
   

   Output appears similar to the following:

   +--------------------+
   | Database           |
   +--------------------+
   | information_schema |
   | mysql              |
   | performance_schema |
   | sys                |
   +--------------------+
   

These steps verify that your MySQL client can successfully connect to the MySQL server over the internal IP address.

Firewall considerations in production environments

The default network configuration in Google Cloud includes a firewall rule, default-allow-internal, that allows internal traffic between Compute Engine instances on a wide range of ports, including the MySQL port, port 3306. In non-default environments with an established security footprint, you might need to create a firewall rule to allow your my-client instance to communicate with your my-server instance over the network. Otherwise, the two instances can't talk to each other.

You can base firewall rules on IP address ranges or tags. IP address ranges are useful if you want to grant access to a wide range of internal IP addresses. Alternatively, if you want to grant access to specific instances on your network, tags provide a more flexible solution. Tags make it easier to add new clients without granting access to a wide range of IP addresses. You need only assign the appropriate tag to the new MySQL client instance. For example, you can create a new firewall rule that allows traffic from all client instances that are tagged with mysql-client.

To support firewall rules using tags, you can assign the appropriate tags to the my-client and my-server VMs in Cloud Shell.

gcloud compute instances add-tags my-client --tags mysql-client --zone=ZONE

gcloud compute instances add-tags my-server --tags mysql-server --zone=ZONE

Add a new firewall rule

The following steps describe how to create a new firewall rule to enable instances with the my-client tag to communicate with instances that have the my-server tag by using port 3306.

• In Cloud Shell, create a firewall rule to allow communications from mysql-client to mysql-server.

  gcloud compute firewall-rules create "mysql-remote-access" \
      --allow tcp:3306 --source-tags "mysql-client" \
      --target-tags "mysql-server"
  

You can now connect to MySQL from my-client.

Access considerations from external clients

This tutorial covers access from MySQL clients to MySQL servers both running on Compute Engine. It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to allow access from a client not running on Compute Engine. If you need to allow non-Compute Engine access, modify the following:

• Add an external IP address to my-server to allow external connectivity.
• Add the source IP address of your external client to the firewall rules.
• Modify the TESTUSER account, or create a user account, that is bound to the source IP address of your external client.

Clean up

To avoid incurring charges to your Google Cloud account for the resources used in this tutorial, you can either delete the project or delete the instances.

Delete the project

The easiest way to eliminate billing is to delete the project that you created for the tutorial.

To delete the project:

Caution: Deleting a project has the following effects:

• Everything in the project is deleted. If you used an existing project for the tasks in this document, when you delete it, you also delete any other work you've done in the project.
• Custom project IDs are lost. When you created this project, you might have created a custom project ID that you want to use in the future. To preserve the URLs that use the project ID, such as an appspot.com URL, delete selected resources inside the project instead of deleting the whole project.

If you plan to explore multiple architectures, tutorials, or quickstarts, reusing projects can help you avoid exceeding project quota limits.

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Manage resources page.

   Go to Manage resources

2. In the project list, select the project that you want to delete, and then click Delete.
3. In the dialog, type the project ID, and then click Shut down to delete the project.

Delete instances

To delete a Compute Engine instance:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the VM instances page.

   Go to VM instances

2. Select the checkbox for your my-server instance.
3. To delete the instance, click More actions, click Delete, and then follow the instructions.

What's next

• Read about high availability for MySQL.
• Read about How to set up MySQL on Compute Engine.
• Configure Cloud Logging for MySQL logs.

• Explore Cloud SQL.

• Explore reference architectures, diagrams, and best practices about Google Cloud. Take a look at our Cloud Architecture Center.