Does PWS limit or restrict outgoing traffic?

Products

• Services Suite

Issue/Introduction

This article discusses whether Pivotal Web Services (PWS) limits or restricts the outgoing traffic.

The applications deployed on the Pivotal web Services (PWS) need to make outgoing connections to the databases, message queues, web services, and other publicly accessible resources on the Internet.

Resolution

If there is a problem connecting to a PWS service or resource, do the following:

• Check if the service has a public IP address and is not running on a private or internal IP address like 192.168.0.x. Services running on the internal or private networks are not going to be routable from PWS.  Expose them to a public IP address before connecting to them from PWS.
• Make sure that the service or resource is accessible from the public Internet. Test accessing it from another location via the Internet. If possible, test accessing it from a server running on the Amazon EC2. If you are not able to connect, check with the network administrator to make sure the traffic is not being blocked by a firewall or any other network device.
• If you can access the resource from anywhere on the Internet but not on the PWS, check to see if there are any restrictions on the location of the incoming traffic to the service. It is common for the services to perform IP address whitelisting which restricts the traffic based on the IP address from where the traffic was originated. PWS does not provide consistent IP addresses which could be added to a whitelist but, you can use a service like QuotaGuard to send your app traffic from a consistent IP. Refer to the article for more details on this.