A great tip for using an Amazon workspace is to create a “shell”. This is basically a mini-installation of the primary Amazon workspace, complete with a login and dashboard. It allows you to use your primary account without having to log into the actual Amazon server. If you’ve ever used the command line interface to run a program on the computer or even learned about Vagrant environments, you should have no problem understanding how to set up an Amazon Workspace using these two approaches.
A virtual private network (VPC) is what makes connecting your workstation to the AWS cloud so easy. Basically, an Amazon AWS subscription gives you access to all of the features of the main AWS service, such as as-dashboard and s3-access. A large distance-based view of Amazon Workspaces is, basically, a big Windows Server instance which is then partitioned into many smaller workstations. They’re built using master collections provided by Amazon and can include Microsoft Office or many other applications as well. These workstations are separated into many different “subnets”, which correspond to geographical areas.
One way to create a more personalized experience is to create one workspace for work, one dedicated to an organization (or simply vPC), and another for the remote desktop. For example, I use my Amazon Workspaces in order to manage my personal blog (a blog) and another for my day job (aws remote desktop). I also use the as-managed directory services for any work-related tasks, and the as-virtual private networks for things like accessing an S3 bucket hosted by Amazon.
