I need to use an external web API for my website and they ask me what will be the IP address where the requests will come from. The point is that my web application is scaled on more Amazon EC2 instances, because it’s deployed using Elastic Beanstalk with auto scaling configured.
What will be the best solution to solve the problem?
The best thing I can think of is to set up a micro instance, associate an Elastic IP to it and use it as an HTTP proxy. Is there a better solution?
I’m sure I’m not the only one having this problem but I couldn’t find another question like my one on stackoverflow. A lot of e-commerce websites usually use an external payment system that requires the requests to come from one or more specific IP addresses…
Thank you.
Update – thanks to @David, I did set up an HTTP proxy using the Apache module mod_proxy. How can I configure it so that only my EC2 instances can access it? My EC2 instances are dynamically created when auto scaling.
ProxyRequests On
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from ???
</Proxy>
Just use a (forward) proxy, Apache2 can do this. By default request will come from the IP address of the proxy (if the service is looking at “REMOTE_ADDR”). Some proxies add “HTTP_X_FORWARD_FOR” to indicate the true IP of the client where the request originated, but I doubt your service would check for this.