Amazon WorkSpaces

https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces

by kaishiro • 12 years ago

169 128 12 years ago

aws.amazon.com

I work for an IT company, and this is very cool. Especially if they make good strides in backups and management (application deployment, etc..).

Much better than buying $100K of hardware for a Terminal Server, and paying $100K of support a year to maintain it ;)

rufugee2• 12 years ago

But what about the bandwidth costs to support a large number of users. I have to imagine that adds up quickly.

odonnellryan3• 12 years ago

It adds up, but not so quickly.

RDP is "smart." The bandwidth requirements can vary from a few KBPS to ~100.

What ends up happening is, if you need more bandwidth in this scenario you're going to need it in general - for downloading files, emails, etc..

Email, usually, takes about the same bandwidth. So, if Amazon is taking that burden, you should be OK.

EvanAnderson• 12 years ago

Nobody spends $100K / yr on "a Terminal Server", either for hardware, software licensing, or support. If you are then you're not going to manage this "solution" any better, or you're going to be at a scale where Amazon's offering will be leaps and bounds more expensive.

odonnellryan3• 12 years ago

Well okay, it's not just a terminal server. But the purpose is for several dozens of users to connect with their "think clients."

It's a virtual host that has a terminal server + a few other servers.

afhsfsfdsss883• 12 years ago

The experience is laggy, as the top reply suggests. Your users which aren't doing much[should they even have their own box anyway? (No)] won't notice, but people who actually use the box[I was a quant in a former life] will hate you for it.

Dual monitors are also somewhat common nowadays[vital for actual productivity], how the heck is that gonna do over Comcast lines?

When the day comes[never] that we have ubiquitous/cheap bandwith, this idea is nearly practical. Until then it is DOA for "real work".

noir_lord• 12 years ago

Even with ubiquitous/cheap bandwidth latency is still an issue (until we get Tachyon Display Port) in any real world scenario.

This might serve a subset well enough but got would it be painful (as you correctly observe) for anything who is hammering the machine.

wil4213• 12 years ago

Sounds a lot similar to what people used to do back in the day with a terminal connected to a central computer. Technology seems to move in circles.

Anyway if it can beat my horrible corporate VDI I am all for it. Although Initech probably wont be switching to some fancy new AWS anytime soon.

csixty4• 12 years ago

And echoed in the 90s by the likes of the Sun Ray series of thin clients.

Wait…thin clients…virtual reality goggles…are we back in 1995 again?

wil4213• 12 years ago

Exactly the circle is completing itself again.

I can remember doing a case study in College where Larry Ellison was trying to push thin clients to companies sometime in the 90s.

angersock• 12 years ago

At least we're not about to claim that Javascript is the next big--oh wait.

Shit.

roc3• 12 years ago

"Technology seems to move in circles."

VDI, Citrix, et al are less a reaction to how awesome mainframe/terminal architecture is, and more a statement about how utterly horrible it is to maintain an enterprise Windows image.

It's not unlike the architecturally-similar-situation with web apps exploding in popularity in the mid 2000s. People were primarily responding to how great it was to have "their stuff" anywhere they happened to sit down, and how horrible the native client experience was, on Windows.

And we've had a great natural test of that theory, with modern mobile devices: Now that people have their own machine with them, wherever they happen to be, with native client experiences that aren't nearly the hassle that desktop Windows was, web apps are playing second-fiddle.

Similarly, this VDI thing is going to run into trouble as enterprise further adopts BYOD and their desktop images are needed by fewer and fewer people.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

Similarly, this VDI thing is going to run into trouble as enterprise further adopts BYOD and their desktop images are needed by fewer and fewer people.

BYOD is one of the big drivers behind VDI: VDI allows enterprise IT shops a measure of control over the security of enterprise data when the physical hardware being used to interact with the data is less trusted.

sliverstorm5• 12 years ago

The circle has already completed, for me. I do 99% of my work over corporate VDI, which is thankfully not horrible at all.

wil4213• 12 years ago

For my company, I dont believe its the actually VDI causing me problems, I'm pretty sure its our horrible internal network.

kayoone3• 12 years ago

Cloud Desktops could be how next generation Desktop computing looks like, i am just not sure how fast we can get over latency and bandwidth limits, especially if you consider coming standards like 4K+, so in the meantime it will probably evolve the way it already does with desktop apps that talk to the cloud but run locally. But for normal office work, eg, Ms Office, this is already fine.

chris_mahan• 12 years ago

I waiting for Plan9 to show up.

sliverstorm5• 12 years ago

No no, that's already been done. I've got my eye on Scheme9.

afhsfsfdsss883• 12 years ago

The network is what kills this idea before it leaves the womb.

Everyday ISPs/Content Providers are constricting the pipes more and more.

All the physical equipment and meatspace savings from this will vanish[shift rather] and the network costs will take their place.

fragsworth• 12 years ago

I seriously doubt this claim that the network costs will be at all significant.

tillinghast• 12 years ago

IE9?

pjmlp2• 12 years ago

OS/360 is back!

mhurron6• 12 years ago

It never left

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Z/OS

It's just not cool

pjmlp2• 12 years ago

Sure, I just meant the idea being mainstream again.

I know a bit of the mainframe world. One of my tasks at my first job was to do OS/400 daily backups.

mhw• 12 years ago

Hmm; one interesting bit is WorkSpaces Sync - https://sync.amazonworkspaces.com/

At first glance it looks something like Dropbox with S3 as the storage backend. They suggest it being used to keep files in sync between a standard PC and a WorkSpace. I wonder if it can be used without the WorkSpace?

apawloski• 12 years ago

Yes, the AWS s3 cli [1] has a --sync option that does that.

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3/sync.html

Edit: Actually this isn't the dropbox functionality. For that you'd have to wrap it in an inotify loop:

"while true; do inotifywait -r -e modify . && aws s3 sync <local> <s3 bucket>; done"

jpdus• 12 years ago

How much bandwith is necessary to run their client per user?

I am thinking about travelling through south-east asia and/or africa for a few months, would this (in addition to ssh) be viable for working/freelancing from remote locations with throwaway hardware?

wging• 12 years ago

Latency might not be great in SE Asia or Africa. The blog post linked elsewhere in these comments indicates that this is currently served up only from Virginia and Oregon.

pisarzp• 12 years ago

You would be surprised how fast internet can be even in remote parts of Laos. I use similar software and was easily able to use my workstation from there. I agree though that it can be hit and miss...

geoffc• 12 years ago

Yay, this is a big step towards making DaaS a reality. The Teradici PCoIP client they use improves the user experience a lot, especially for video. Now just waiting for an API so we can incorporate Workspaces into Leostreamdesktops.com as another DaaS option.

unwind• 12 years ago

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_as_a_service) "Daas" also means "data as a service". Something tells me you meant "desktop as a service", i.e. desktop virtualization, though?

I guess my point is that "*aas" acronyms are (besides ugly, but that's just my opinion) not always very clear; please consider writing what you mean at least the first time before using an acronym.

Don't assume everyone knows what you know, especially for rather new and up-in-the-air technology terminology such as this.

smacktoward• 12 years ago

Ambiguity as a Service (AaaS)™

badman_ting• 12 years ago

Paas can be platform as a service or pretty colored easter eggs. Shit happens.

esw• 12 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6726962

eli• 12 years ago

Is there something new about WorkSpaces?

Here's a discussion about it from a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6726962

bxgde9• 12 years ago

It just went GA today: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/03/amazon-workspaces-now-ava...

dn2k• 12 years ago

"WorkSpaces provide users with the Windows 7 Experience"

I don't really want to have a Windows 7 Experience.. wonder why they don't provide a linux desktop.

gtaylor• 12 years ago

You can do that easily yourself with EC2. Windows requires a little more hand-holding on their part on AWS.

altcognito• 12 years ago

Licensing, Licensing, Licensing.

Feel free to imagine Ballmer running around a stage yelling this.

rufugee2• 12 years ago

I agree...I'd like a Linux desktop as well. However, what client software on the Linux side performs as well as RDP? How can I get that same performance?

VNC certainly doesn't do it. NX is about as close as I've come, and it can still be laggy at times. I think Spice may be the future on this side, but not sure.

For those of you who run remote Linux desktops in the cloud and actually use a UI, how do you do it and get an adequate desktop experience (sound, video, etc)?

bdcravens3• 12 years ago

You can actually use RDP for Linux. Most of what I do is server stuff, so this really hasn't been a concern of mine, but recently I was playing with the custom cryptocurrency mining distro, BAMT. You connect to it via RDP client (in this case, I used Microsoft's OSX client). I can't say anything about performance relative to VNC/NX, however.

cosmie• 12 years ago

To be fair, they're not really jazzing up how great of an experience Windows 7 is, but rather referring to enabling the Desktop Experience feature[1] of Windows Server 2008 that installs/enables standard desktop features and allow it to be used akin to an end-user desktop.

[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772567.aspx

runako• 12 years ago

There appears to be a pretty big gap between the pricing of the WorkSpaces Windows machines and the same(?) machines purchased through EC2. For example, an m3.medium is 1 vCPU, 3.75GiB and is ~$126/mo. The Standard WorkSpaces machine is 1 vCPU, 3.75GiB and $35/mo.

Are there reasons not to move Windows workloads from EC2 to WorkSpaces?

aganders32• 12 years ago

Maybe the impending EC2 price drop (predicted by many in light of the new Google cloud pricing) will bring it in line.

aganders32• 12 years ago

They just announced the new pricing [0]. It's much cheaper, but still about 2x the price of the WorkSpaces. The only difference I can see is the local storage: 4 GB SSD on EC2 vs. 50 GB on WorkSpaces. I have to assume WorkSpaces is using a spinning HDD in that case.

[0] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/effective-april-2014/

khc• 12 years ago

Probably WorkSpaces is not designed to be active 24/7. Desktop CPU usages are also usually much lighter than server usages.

lchengify• 12 years ago

The windows EC2 machines are also designed for web traffic (IIS servers). I suspect these machines will still get traffic but not at the volume of a web server.

notatoad• 12 years ago

it's probably priced assuming 40hrs/week usage, not 168hrs/week usage.

sailfast• 12 years ago

One thing to note that took me awhile to find - Workspaces requires installation of local client software to function, so if your devices or computers have software install restrictions you will want to work with your infrastructure / change review folks to get it approved before buying.

bane2• 12 years ago

I've scratched my head on what exactly the use-case for this is. I'm going to need a computer of some sort to access my remote anyways. So what's the point?

Then I remember the remote freelance job my wife had for a while. They mailed her the employment paperwork, she filled it out, once they processed it they sent her a remote desktop URL, username and password and voila she was "at work". A day or two later she had everything she needed installed by the IT staff and off she went. She never actually went into the office, even once, and never met any of the employees there face-to-face. When she completed her contract they simply nuked the account she was using and reclaimed the licenses. They didn't ship her a laptop to work from and she didn't have to ship it back. If she had ever needed to go into the office, they could have let her use an aging extra machine with Remote Desktop to get back to work. Not a single piece of the company's "property" ever needed to come in contact with my wife's home computer and if she was waiting for her work computer to do something she could just minimize the RDP client and do something else.

I have no idea what they would have been paying for the Terminal server on their end, I've heard it runs north of $100k/year, and this service seems to be competing with that.

Touche2• 12 years ago

This is going to be big for Chromebooks, I suspect.

joezydeco3• 12 years ago

And IT departments that don't want company data to ever exist on the laptops. We're back to dumb terminals and mainframes.

travem• 12 years ago

I think there is a market there. VMware and Google have already announced a partnership on VMware's DaaS and Chromebooks - http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2014/02/vmware-to-bring...

VMware's DaaS has been available since earlier this month - http://www.vmware.com/products/daas

OWaz• 12 years ago

It very well could be if the experience does not seem laggy. I've been using a Windows VM from Azure whenever I want to do something that my Chromebook can't do. I get to the VM with Chrome remote desktop in a new window and it works pretty well.

mbesto• 12 years ago

It's the Citrix killer.[0] I suspect the price is way lower than what Citrix charges and goes into a fairly untapped market of "non-biz" folk that might have use cases for it.

[0] http://www.citrix.com/products/xendesktop/overview.html

xbryanx• 12 years ago

This could be especially useful for health professionals accessing big enterprise systems like Epic.

nebulasri2• 12 years ago

Citrix seemed to have been a partner to Amazon: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/global-solution-providers/ci...

Not sure if Workspaces has any sort of collaboration with Citrix.

chmars• 12 years ago

I hope other providers will follow suit. Amazon's offers are great but outside the US, using Amazon services becomes more and more of a legal problem due to privacy concerns.

bdunbar3• 12 years ago

Which is why Amazon AWS is available in Europe.

Which is _great_ because we're going after the EU market in a little bit.

keithxm23• 12 years ago

I think the primary use case is not for personal use but for large corporations. The high availability (which we've also seen in aws) and pay-as-you-go pricing are probably the biggest selling points.

jweir3• 12 years ago

So having given this a try. To setup a user with a machine is trivial. You enter their name, email address and what type of machine to give them.

Then an email is sent to them with all instructions and a validation code.

They do not need to have an AWS account.

And, it can tie into a firm's existing directory of users: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/adminguide/conn...

bdunbar3• 12 years ago

We have a use-case down at the office.

Some of what we do is processing legal files. This involves managing 'our' ftp site, provided by the vendor.

Turns out this is a 'windows' server, connected via iscsi, to a directory where their FTP server dumps the files. This is, judging by the hostname, a vmware host.

I suspect an AWS workspace would be a lot cheaper to run than a VMWare cluster.

davidw• 12 years ago

It looks like it'd be handy if I could spin up a Mac or Windows desktop to test stuff with, but it looks like you can't connect to it from Linux. Too bad.

rahimnathwani• 12 years ago

VMware View uses the same protocol (Teradici PCoIP) and has a linux client. Have any VMware View linux users here tried to connect to Amazon Workspaces?

YZF2• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure the View and AWS clients will not interoperate. Teradici does have the technology so it's a question of how important it is for Amazon to deliver a Linux client.

scottlinux• 12 years ago

It appears WorkSpaces requires a client which is not available for Linux desktop users nor ChromeOS. :/

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/adminguide/clie...

nknighthb2• 12 years ago

Android-x86 VM?

Hm. I wonder if anyone is doing the work to get Android apps runnable on desktop Linux systems. Some googling suggests that at this point, Android-x86 can more or less run in a chroot already...

nebulasri2• 12 years ago

Microsoft execs would be kicking themselves for not coming into this market first.

kylemaxwell2• 12 years ago

Except Azure VDI is already a thing.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 12 years ago

Argh. It's a shame that the ReactOS "Thorium Core" Kickstarter didn't get funded. It would have been nice to see ROS developed to a point where it'd be a good OS to virtualise (for free).

foobarqux• 12 years ago

Is there a free demo to try?

RachelF• 12 years ago

It says free trial but then asks for $35 per month for me.

alecsmart1• 12 years ago

What they need to do is add a way to access the remote machine without Windows/Mac. Something as simple as "use this usb to boot your computer and enter your credentials to login to your remote machine".

kylemaxwell2• 12 years ago

When there's a Linux client, you could do this easily by adapting any one of several distros.

jweir3• 12 years ago

So, I gave this a try, if you are interested.

The UX for the account setup and workspace admin is pretty rough, feels MVP (but it works).

It took about 30 minutes for my machine to be provisioned. Then I got an email. Downloaded the OS X client, about 30 megs.

Launched. Took about a minute to login and get my machine booted.

GUI performance for small area updates is great, dragging a window not so great. It is usable, but not fluid.

My connection is showing 70Mbps/10Mbps with 12ms latency on speedtest.net

Using a IE. Oh this is interesting – when going to Google, I am at google.tw

Where is this machine hosted? Showing an IP of 54.85.209.100 (US), odd...

Visiting Youtube, Youtube.tw comes up, video is a bit choppy, audio is fine.

Visiting nytimes.com. Loading is a bit slow, scrolling is very choppy. Text selection is very fast.

Downloaded some CSV, opens in Excel. This is fast, and very usable.

Disconnect.

Log back in, everything is just as I left it (of course).

--- continued ---

I download the client for the iPad, enter the registration code, and login.

There is a 13 part tutorial on gestures (way too many for me to remember) Fortunately you can drag a menu of commands from the left side easily.

I play around a bit, it works fine.

Now I login from my computer, oh bummer, my iPad session was disconnected.

You can only be logged in from device at a time. That is too bad. It would be nice to share.

Robby2012• 12 years ago

Thank you very much for you explanation, I wasn't able to make it work.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 12 years ago

You can only be logged in from device at a time. That is too bad. It would be nice to share.

I wonder if this is to do with licensing.

Using a IE. Oh this is interesting – when going to Google, I am at google.tw
Where is this machine hosted? Showing an IP of 54.85.209.100 (US), odd...

I bet Google's GeoIP DB has some flaws, and this is the result of one of them.

seanmcdirmid• 12 years ago

Google recently thinks I'm in India and has been serving me up Indian YouTube adds recently. I work in Beijing using a Japanese proxy, so I don't really get how that works.

tedchs• 12 years ago

Can you access Stack Overflow from it? EC2's IP ranges have been banned for a while because of scrapers and other abuse.

jweir3• 12 years ago

Yes I can and the machine's address is...

ec2-54-85-209-100.compute-1.amazonaws.com

jrsmith1279• 12 years ago

I noticed the google.tw from AWS instances that are hosted in the US. Seemed odd to me at the time, but it's even more odd that it's the same on workspace instances too.

rwmj• 12 years ago

I (didn't) launch a similar service in 2000. I just wrote about it here:

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/officemaster/#content

sjs3822• 12 years ago

I wish I could spin up a Mac desktop to test some stuff with htis. Anyone have any inside info re: whether they have plans for Mac WorkSpaces?

kayoone3• 12 years ago

Doubt it because of licensing issues. Apple does not allow virtualising OSX on anything except OSX ;)

bdcravens3• 12 years ago

Probably not, as they currently offer no OSX-backed instances.

Even if they did, Apple restricts OSX to Apple hardware. There are a few companies out there that offer this, but typically you'll pay $25-40 for a fairly anemic setup (say 1-1.5 GB). This is likely a direct product of the hardware cost, as opposed to the ability to use commodity hardware for Windows/Linux.

sjs3822• 12 years ago

Do you happen to know the name of the vendor that does this?

teacup50• 12 years ago

Your much better off virtualizing Mac OS X locally. With small tweaks, you can even do this with VMware on Windows.

samstave• 12 years ago

Id love to have a workspace app on my smart tv though...

ehPReth• 12 years ago

The video says "to replace the support and security headaches of physical desktop machines" but wouldn't you still have to worry about the end device's security? Especially so in this case since the user likely has admin access on it?

What if the device a user is logging in from has a keylogger/screencapper that captures everything they do with their 'cloud desktop'? What if they contract malware that specifically pulls data from the 'cloud desktop' (i.e. from a targeted attack)?

subdane• 12 years ago

Am I the only one that read this and thought, "Brilliant! Amazon's getting into co-working!" From AWS to Co-working to buying AirBnB, Seamless and Uber (I'm spackling) Amazon could own a startup kid's life from cradle to grave.

driverdan• 12 years ago

I didn't get this when it was first announced and don't get it now. $600/y will get you your own hardware and software licenses. Access with RDC or VNC. Hardware can easily last 3 years so now you're looking at $600 vs $1800 (excluding power, bandwidth and IT staff). Why would anyone use this?

bdunbar3• 12 years ago

I have a use case. It's 'niche' but that's where I have been working for almost a year.

In the legal field there are a scatload of organizations that process data. Data is moved by FTP or SFTP. It's organized by case and/or client.

The directories can hold hundreds - or thousands - of files, compressed file sizes nearly 500mb are not uncommon.

To _manage_ this mess o' bytes users are given 'a windows server', login by RDP. The server has (the ones I've seen) a connection via ISCSI to a 'drive' that is (tada) the FTP repository. Move, delete, rename using Windows Explorer.

The several that I've seen are vmware instances. Living - I guess - on a dedicated vmware cluster.

This is _made_ for uses like that.

The _heck_ with paying for, and maintaining, an expensive machine. Boot up a workspace, create the user. Bill them cost. When you're done, shut it down.

This is good because we, ourselves, are aiming to be a data processing org (in part) but we have to do it better and cheaper. Which we can, with workspace.

Assuming, of course, that we can have some control over what is installed, and connections to our already existing ebs volumes.

zdrummond• 12 years ago

Why did Amazon build a new replacement for Desktops, in 2014, and package it with IE 9?

josephjrobison• 12 years ago

Pardon my ignorance, for an individual on a mac that wants to use this, what's the difference between this and a Windows instance on EC2? I'm assuming this product is for managing teams, versus my solo EC2 instance?

jdorfman• 12 years ago

and this is why I left IT

veidr• 12 years ago

    (T_T) Waaaaah:

    REGION UNSUPPORTED

    WorkSpaces is not available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo).
    Please select another region.

Amazon WorkSpaces

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