Port Forwarding Rules tab

The Port Forwarding Rules tab displays the current port forwarding rules in effect for the instance. Port forwarding is used to enable communications between external hosts and services offered within a VLAN (virtual local area network) in a private cloud. As a common use case, you could use port forwarding rules to enable external hosts to access SSH or HTTP services on a specific instance and port in your VLAN. Port forwarding is often known as port mapping, because a request on a public port gets mapped to a private port number. The port can be the same on both sides, or mapped from any open external port to any open internal port. Unlike port forwarding in traditional computing, in virtual environments (such as cloud infrastructures that support port forwarding capabilities) you can have multi-tenant IP addressing. That is, a virtual instance in the cloud could support more than one IP address. This offers a lot of flexibility on how to forward network traffic for a given IP:Port combination, and is also why both an IP address and Instance name are required when configuring port forwarding rules.

Default Fields

• Resource UID, Actions
• Instance - The running instance to forward the network traffic to. Because the instance and IP address are rather loosely coupled (e.g. not always 1:1) for clouds with port forwarding capabilities, you must specify both the instance and IP Address to forward traffic to.
• IP Address - Specify the public IP address for the instance to forward traffic to. The instance might have only one IP address, but it could be more than one. Hence, you must specify the IP too.
• Public Port - Incoming network traffic on this public port will get forwarded (to the IP:Private Port of the specified Instance).
• Private Port - Incoming network traffic will get forwarded to this port number on the specified Instance.
• Protocol - Type of network traffic that gets forwarded. Specify UDP or TCP traffic.

Actions

• New - Create a new port forwarding rule.
• Delete - Delete an existing port forwarding rule.