Do you want to find out the public IP address of your private instances (those in a private VPC subnet) but don’t know how? An easy way to do this would be to just do a “whatsmyip” equivalent on the private instance such as this:
wget http://ipecho.net/plain -O - -q ; echo
However, there’s an even easier way to figure this out, especially if AWS is your bread and butter. Every private instance communicates to the outside world via a NAT instance or a NAT gateway (yes, this is your ‘duh’ moment). So, all that you need is your NAT gateway’s or NAT instance’s Elastic IP address and you’re done.
In my case, I was trying to allow an ELB on one AWS account to see traffic from private instances on another AWS account. So, I just added an entry to the ELB’s security group to listen from the NAT gateway’s Elastic IP of the other AWS account and I was done.
