AWS VPC port forwarding techniques

Port forwarding using 'iptables' is extremely useful for ad-hoc interactions with your instances located on the private subnet on the VPC in situations when you do not wish to re-design your network architecture. 
As you must already know the instances on private subnet are not able to interact with the external world unless configured to use a NAT instance (located on the public subnet) as their GW.

So, for the example, let's say I want to forward any requests coming from the outside world to port 8080 via my NAT instance Elastic IP (which is an external, routable IP address) to an instance located on my private subnet - Puppet Master server, so:

• My NAT instance external IP address (Elastic IP) is:123.123.123.123
• My NAT instance internal IP address is:10.0.0.254
• My Puppet  Master internal IP address is:10.0.1.239

First, on the NAT instance make sure IP forwarding is enabled:
[root@ip-10-0-0-254 ~]#cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
1
[root@ip-10-0-0-254 ~]#
We are good to go....
Next, we will instruct to redirect any requests coming to port 8080 to IP 10.0.1.239 port 8080: 
 
[root@ip-10-0-0-254 ~]# iptables -t nat -i eth0 -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 8080 -j DNAT --to 10.0.1.239:8080

Note, that in some cases you will want to limit this function only for incoming traffic, since the above example will forward any requests (even from inside the VPC) destined for port 8080, the best solution is to specify the destination IP address of the NAT instance -

[root@ip-10-0-0-254 ~]# iptables -t nat -d 10.0.0.254 -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 8080-j DNAT --to 10.0.1.239:8080

Pay attention that I've specified the NAT internal IP address. The reason for that is because the destination IP of the packet is in fact NAT instance internal IP - that's because Amazon EC2 already use NAT when correlating between elastic IP's and instance internal IP addresses.

Verify the command worked with:

[root@ip-10-0-0-254 ~]#iptables -L -t nat -v


Save your iptables configuration:
[root@ip-10-0-0-254 ~]#iptables-save > fw_conf_`date +%F`
[root@ip-10-0-0-254 ~]#/etc/init.d/iptables save

Make sure the security group your NAT instance is currently using allows relevant incoming traffic.

Finally, test the connection from outside of the VPC (make sure traffic is not blocked by any security group):

>telnet 123.123.123.123 8080

Your request now should be be redirected to the back-end node on private subnet on the VPC.

Cheers.