OpenVPN Configuration for VPC on Ubuntu 12.04

One of my more popular posts so far has been OpenVPN with Amazon VPC. I'm guessing that the lack of a step by step process or, at the very least, the configuration files, has left you annoyed. In this post, I'll give step by step instructions and configuration files to you, so that you can have all the goodness that is a private VPN on VPC.

While the servers that I ran this on are Ubuntu 12.04, it wouldn't surprise me if the configuration and setup worked on various versions of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, and more.

OpenVPN with Amazon VPC

Although I did not initially plan to setup a VPN between Lucidchart's office and the newly setup VPC, I changed my mind before I even migrated the first server.

The reasoning is simple. I don't want our services to be publicly accessible; however, our office needs access to those services. The services I'm talking about include git, chef, apt, jenkins, and more. 

These services are not the only issue. Imagine a problem in production that requires manual debugging. I would have to tunnel through the NAT instance manually just to debug the problem server. When I'm having any issue in production, the last thing I want is an extra step.