Question

Difficulty: MediumVPC Connectivity and Routing Troubleshooting

A company uses an automated CI/CD pipeline to deploy utility servers into a designated subnet within a custom VPC. After a recent deployment, the utility servers are assigned public IPv4 addresses, but administrators are unable to establish SSH connections (2222) or ping the servers from the internet. The security group and Network ACL associated with the subnet both explicitly allow SSH traffic.

Which of the following routing issues is preventing external access to these utility servers?

  1. A default route (0.0.0.0/00.0.0.0/0) targeting the VPC's Internet Gateway is missing from the subnet's route table.Answer
  2. B
    The stateless Network ACL is missing an inbound rule to allow return traffic on ephemeral ports 1024-655351024\text{-}65535.
  3. C
    A route targeting the Gateway VPC Endpoint for SSH traffic has not been added to the subnet's routing configuration.
  4. D
    The routing configuration directs all external traffic (0.0.0.0/00.0.0.0/0) to a NAT gateway provisioned in the same subnet.

Answer

A default route (0.0.0.0/00.0.0.0/0) targeting the VPC's Internet Gateway is missing from the subnet's route table.
A public subnet must have a route table containing a default route (0.0.0.0/00.0.0.0/0) pointing to the Internet Gateway. If this route is missing, instances in the subnet cannot communicate with resources outside the VPC, causing external connection attempts to time out.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the subnet configuration and connectivity type.
The utility servers have public IPv4 addresses and need to receive incoming SSH connections from the internet, which means they must reside in a public subnet.
To determine why traffic from the internet is timing out despite security groups and Network ACLs being open.
2
Check the routing path from the subnet to the internet.
A subnet is only public if its route table explicitly routes internet-bound traffic (0.0.0.0/00.0.0.0/0) to the VPC's Internet Gateway.
Without this route, the VPC router does not know how to forward traffic to the internet, and incoming packets cannot be returned, leading to connection timeouts.

Key Concept

VPC Route Table Configuration for Public Subnets
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