In this exercise, I’m going to pull together a number of different threads – namely, the design and implementation of the infrastructure to spin up an EC2 instance (hosting Workbench, which will allow me to interact with a database) and an RDS MySQL instance. My objective is to be able to create a database and implement queries using Workbench. Along the way, I’ll get some additional practice configuring subnets, route tables, security groups. Let’s begin!

First off, I’m going to create a VPC (10.16.0.0/16) named wb-rds-project in the Oregon region (us-west-2) . I select Default Tenancy.

Next, I create the subnets as well – I create a public subnet (10.16.0.0/20) titled wb-rds-sn-pub-2a, and private subnet (10.16.16.0/20, wb-rds-sn-priv-2a, both within the availability zone (AZ) us-west-2a.

I create a public IGW, wb-rds-igw, and attach it to the VPC.

Update: I had a difficult time downloading the Workbench to an EC2 instance using the CLI. Given time constraints, I spun up a MySQL RDS instance and then downloaded and installed the Workbench on my local worksation, connecting to to the RDS instance using its endpoint. That worked well, and met my needs since the Workbench was 1/3 the size of the MySQL database, so overall, I had to install one quarter the resources that I would have had to do otherwise if I had installed everything on my local computer. I am running out of computer memory resources so that is a big concern for me!