Our development environment is hosted on AWS, and is accessed by dozens of people. As people join and leave the project, or work from alternate (often temporary) locations, I find myself constantly updating many of our security groups.
Example: Caroline is a developer who primarily works from home.
- When she joins the project, I add her public IP address to the
security groups "dev-a", "dev-b", "dev-c", and "dev-d"; her entries
are noted as "Caroline Lastname home"‡
- On Monday, severe weather
knocks out Caroline's power; when it comes back on, her public IP
address has changed, so I have to update her "Caroline Lastname
home" entries in security groups "dev-a", "dev-b", "dev-c", and
"dev-d".
- A week later, Caroline visits her parents in another state.
She determines her new public IP and conveys it to me and I add
entries in security groups "dev-a", "dev-b", "dev-c", and "dev-d"
noted as "Caroline Lastname temp [YYYYMMDD]".
- I subsequently
remove these "temp" IP entries on a sort of garbage-collect basis.
- When Caroline pops into the office to work, there is nothing additional for me to do because the office's IP range is already configured where it needs to be.
Now multiply these activities by the number of personnel on the project...you can see why I have the link to the security group listing bookmarked!
How can I easily manage constantly changing public IP addresses in my many security groups? What steps can I take to simplify my administrative overhead of the security group entries?
‡: All names (including security group names) have been altered to protect the innocent.