Amazon's cloudy desktops now tiptoe across hot sand

Amazon Web Services has found another way to make its “Workspaces” desktop-as-a-service offering more attractive: as of today the cloudy Windows instances run on solid state disks instead of ye olde spinning rust hard disks. The change doesn't change AWS' price for the service. The new disks are AWS' general purpose SSDs, so …

[AMBxx]

Still don't get it

Given the option of Cheap PC, Citrix, VM desktop thingie, little PC stick thing or AWS, I can't see any good reason to pick AWS.

Still looks like a solution looking for a problem.

[Adam 52]

Re: Still don't get it

What are you going to connect your cheap Citrix client to?

And how are you going to get low-latency world-wide?

If that's not your use-case then fine, it's not mine either, but there are people who want it. We have 200 or so 1 or 2 person branch offices distributed across the world. This is one option IT are considering for supporting them.

[Buzzword]

Re: Still don't get it

The idea is to take away all the hardware management problems, and many of the software management problems. But their pricing doesn't seem attractive: $300+/year for a secretary-spec PC, bearing in mind you still need to provide keyboard/video/mouse and a fast low-latency internet connection.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Still don't get it

I'm not convinced either, but some enterprise use cases include:

http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/deploying-amazon-workspaces-at-scale-with-johnson-johnson

Sure, it's biased (!) but I see more rationale from it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Still don't get it

It does seems like an old school way of doing things. The way to go about it is to make sure all of your apps can run on any web browser, either natively or through a XenApp type of service... then use Chrome OS or something of that sort that is on the laptop, but no one notices it, it boots in no time, no management or patching required.

[Greyeye]

running VDI in-house is a costly business. VDI license (Vmware or Citrix), hypervisors (yes another licenses), super fast SAN (1 VM can demand over 1000 IOPS during boot and busy period), and of course, file server with profiles and so on.

this isnt to compete with plain old desktop fleets in the office, but to compete with VDI deployments out there that has outgrown or sick of upscaling for the performance.