How do I get the public DNS for an Amazon Workspace (virtual desktop)?

Neil Philip asked:

Running nginx reverse proxy on an Amazon Workspace (virtual desktop). How can I get a public DNS or a stable public ip address (like an elastic IP?)

My answer:

You can manually assign Elastic IPs to a WorkSpace if it is in a public subnet. But instead of attaching them directly to instances as you might have done with EC2 instances, you need to attach them to the WorkSpace’s public subnet Network Interface. The Amazon WorkSpaces documentation explains how this is done:

To assign an Elastic IP address to a WorkSpace manually

  1. Open the Amazon WorkSpaces console at

  2. In the navigation pane, choose WorkSpaces.

  3. Expand the row for the WorkSpace and note the value of WorkSpace IP. This is the primary private IP address of WorkSpace.

  4. Open the Amazon EC2 console at

  5. In the navigation pane, choose Elastic IPs. If you do not have an available Elastic IP address, choose Allocate new address and
    follow the directions.

  6. In the navigation pane, choose Network Interfaces.

  7. Select the network interface for your WorkSpace. Note that the value of VPC ID matches the ID of your WorkSpaces VPC and the
    value of Primary private IPv4 IP matches the primary private IP
    address of the WorkSpace that you noted earlier.

  8. Choose Actions, Associate Address.

  9. On the Associate Elastic IP Address page, choose an Elastic IP address from Address and then choose Associate Address.

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