RDS Publicly Accessible

What this rule checks

Detects RDS instances that are publicly accessible.

How to fix it

1. 1Set PubliclyAccessible to false
2. 2Use VPC security groups to control access
3. 3Access databases through bastion hosts or VPN

import { aws_ec2 as ec2, aws_rds as rds } from 'aws-cdk-lib';

const vpc = new ec2.Vpc(this, 'Vpc');

new rds.DatabaseInstance(this, 'Db', {
  engine: rds.DatabaseInstanceEngine.postgres({ version: rds.PostgresEngineVersion.VER_16 }),
  vpc,
  vpcSubnets: { subnetType: ec2.SubnetType.PUBLIC },
  publiclyAccessible: true,
});

import { aws_ec2 as ec2, aws_rds as rds } from 'aws-cdk-lib';

const vpc = new ec2.Vpc(this, 'Vpc');

new rds.DatabaseInstance(this, 'Db', {
  engine: rds.DatabaseInstanceEngine.postgres({ version: rds.PostgresEngineVersion.VER_16 }),
  vpc,
  vpcSubnets: { subnetType: ec2.SubnetType.PRIVATE_WITH_EGRESS },
  publiclyAccessible: false,
});

CDK Insights pinpoints the exact file and line in your CDK source for every finding, so you can jump straight to the fix.

Affected resource types

Intentional? Suppress this finding

Sometimes a flag is deliberate — a genuinely public endpoint, say. You can dismiss rds-publicly-accessible and the reason is kept in the report, not silently hidden.

In .cdk-insights.json:

{
  "ignoreRules": [
    { "id": "rds-publicly-accessible", "reason": "Why this is intentional" }
  ]
}

Or inline in your CDK code:

Validations.of(scope).acknowledge({
  id: 'cdk-insights::rds-publicly-accessible',
  reason: 'Why this is intentional',
});

Use the rule ID rds-publicly-accessible shown above — not the CDK-* ID from SARIF / GitHub code scanning. To dismiss every finding on one construct instead, use ignorePaths. Suppression docs →

More RDS rules