
Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything - rerapp
https://workstream.paperspace.com/
======
jcrawfordor
I was pretty excited to give this a try because it might be a good fit for
some frustrations I've had with running a GPU-dependent task on my laptop
without discrete graphics.

Onboarding experience is terrible. Registered for an account from the
Workstream page linked here, and was taken to a console with absolutely no
mention of Workstream. Went back and forth a few times trying to figure out if
auth provider had redirected to the wrong page after registration only.
Ultimately searched through comments here to find out that Workstream is a
variant of the CORE product. Having figured that out, went to the Core
product, was rejected on creating an instance due to no payment on file. Not a
huge issue, but would have been nice if I was prompted up front to complete
this. Once I'm past that hurdle, I go back to the CORE product and find out
that I'm not allowed to create GPU instances until I put in a ticket.

I'm hoping that this was some accident where this landing page ended up on HN
when it wasn't supposed to be public knowledge yet, otherwise the lack of
thought on just the setup process here is pretty concerning. I'm also pretty
confused at the requirement that I put in a ticket to have GPU instances
enabled when they've already taken payment info, and it seems like a test auth
would be a better anti-fraud measure than the half-sentence I typed in.

Man, my excitement here sure was short lived.

Edit: got an email that I had been enabled. went to look. Three of the GPU
types still show as locked but one no longer shows the lock icon, so I guess
approvals are per-type? But I can't select the "unlocked" GPU type, it's
disabled. There's no explanation of why. A couple of minutes of trying
different combinations and I find out that it's due to the DC, if I choose a
different DC I can select it. So I guess they're only available in one DC, at
least right now? It would have been nice to be told that.

Edit: got the machine to provision, installed the client from another HN
comment. I logged into Paperspace using a Google account. The client does not
list this as an option. Only email, github, AD, and SAML. I give up. Except
for the machine is still provisioning and I have paid $10 for storage. Great.

~~~
pta
I don't know if it has anything to do with this announcement (e.g. some
malicious actor taking advantage of a dormant vulnerability), but just a few
days ago someone managed to almost invade my Paperspace account. Fortunately
the system detected it as suspicious, but it seems they managed to get the
password right.

The weird thing is I haven't used this thing since years ago when I registered
and used it, like, twice? And I used a unique, secure password which I'm
pretty sure I've never shared with anyone or typed anywhere else or in any
unsafe devices. No Google login either (but I've logged out of all devices and
removed authorization for all external services just to be sure).

So I emailed them asking what happened and how I could cancel my account
(because there's no way to do it via the website). They didn't give any detail
except say someone did manage to "semi" sign in, more than once, in a few
separate days recently. At least they responded quickly and deleted my
account.

~~~
glial
I had the exact same experience.

------
woah
I've used Paperspace's Gradient product (hosted Jupyter notebooks), and while
it is cheaper than most other options, I can't recommend it. The service has a
very janky feel. When I first started, there was an issue where my instance
was was stuck "shutting down" for half an hour or more and I couldn't access
my code. Then there was a weird issue where some kind of geographical split
between different types of instances resulted in my code getting lost (I think
it happened twice). It has the feel of a product held together by duct tape
and chewing gum with a thin veneer of slick graphic design. I recently tried
using their CORE product (GPU heavy VMs), but for some reason instances with
GPU's are not enabled until you write them a message (I did, and they haven't
responded in a week).

My advice would be to use the cheap, high performance machines (VC
subsidized?) if it makes sense, but never ever store data with them without
backing up to a different service (git or Dropbox maybe?)

~~~
DTE
CEO of Paperspace here. I'm really sorry about this. That is not the
experience that we are striving for and FWIW, since leaving beta, Gradient is
much more mature at this point (many millions of hours of runtime and lots of
developer work). We have been aggressively stabilizing (and building out new
features) over the past few years and continue to improve the product every
release. My sincerest apologies for your negative experience early on I hope
you will give it another try.

~~~
spiritplumber
Hey, I'm old and operate in a space where most things run at single Mhz speed
(but have to work underwater, in a vacuum, and other interesting places).

What does your service do? Is it like VNCing into my dev box in the shop,
except (I hope) more responsive?

~~~
xupybd
That sounds really interesting. Where do you work?

~~~
GlenTheMachine
I’d guess he’s a spacecraft engineer who does work in a neutral buoyancy tank.
In the Us that usually means NASA/Johnson. That or he’s a spacecrqft engineer
at a contract firm that picks up side projects doing underwater automation
work, which is not that uncommon in this small field. Oceaneering Space
Systems, for example.

~~~
spiritplumber
The second one. I've done a couple things at NASA/Ames and it has been
generally fun, although there have been a couple of weird episodes (Like me
not being authorized to check out stuff from my own repository due to not
being a US citizen, and being told that it wasn't a unique case).

------
CJefferson
Was going to try their Free account, until I signed up and the discovered the
big black "Free" had a tiny light grey "\+ Machine Utilization Charges"
beneath it. Everything is "Free + Charges".

~~~
hnCensorFreedum
I'm waiting for my honest business practices to pay off.

No cookies, no ads, donations only.

It hasn't paid off aside from about 1k per year in revenue and lots of thank
you emails.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
No cookies, no ads, source code always available, pay for a prebuilt version,
user names price ... in excess of $100k/year (after 20 years :) ... ardour.org

~~~
z3t4
Thinking about going open source but too afraid of hostile forks. How do you
prevent people from stealing the business?

~~~
NullPrefix
By hostile you mean stolen GPL and included into proprietary tech? Or another,
competing GPL product?

~~~
z3t4
Lets say some of the contributors want a piece of the cake, they make their
own website, SEO, and actively tell everyone that their fork is better.

The GPL license give you better protection then say MIT in this regard though.

------
VikingCoder
I'm just going to state again what I want, which is only tangentially related
to the topic...

1) I go on Github and configure a service

2) I make a wallet that people can donate to

3) I start up a virtual machine, aimed at the Github, using the wallet to pay
for the time on the machine. The virtual machine host _guarantees_ that the
code at that Github is what's really running.

I can imagine lots of other things I want, too, but this is the bare minimum.
I think it'd be really useful in a lot of scenarios.

~~~
derefr
This—the ability to audit what's running on the backend you're talking to—is
in large part what people get out of smart contracts on e.g. Ethereum. You can
take the contract source code from GitHub, compile it (deterministically), and
validate that the deployed-on-chain smart-contract binary is the same. The
blockchain nature of the platform then ensures that the contract will do
exactly and only what you "expect" it to do (i.e. it'll do the same thing "in
production" that it does when you test it on your own machine, since any node
that tries to execute the code differently would diverge its state from the
consensus, and be ignored.)

In essence, a Turing-complete smart-contract blockchain _is_ a
deterministically-trustworthy compute-hosting service. It's one that has the
disadvantage of all the overhead distributed auditability requires; but at
least has the advantage (compared to centralized compute-hosting with remote-
attestation) that it already exists and is usable right now for real-world
use-cases.

(And you can also reduce the blockchain-y overhead by moving whatever backend
business logic you can out of the "trust kernel" into untrusted regular
machines, and then just having the "trust kernel" do the important stuff.
CryptoKitties is a good example of this: the only thing their smart contract
does is track who owns what kitty, because that's what people would try to
dispute by forging transactions. The rest of the stuff is state in a regular
centralized RDBMS, because it's dictated by the service, rather than by user
input, and so is not under dispute.)

~~~
crispyporkbites
Ethereum is basically one big cloud computer, with a shared runtime.

Everyone gets a copy of the code AND all the data/state, and can execute all
instructions.

Problem is that it’s too slow/expensive to do anything useful.

But perhaps the killer app for blockchain is buried somewhere in this concept.

~~~
ghthor
Just because you dont understand how to do something useful using ethereum
doesnt mean that no one knows how to do something useful with ethereum.

Please investigate ethereum name system(ENS) and Handshake name system.

------
dbish
I think there is a market here. I don't use this service, but instead use an
EC2 instance as my developer box (for personal projects) and I do like being
able to easily move between multiple machines, no matter where I am and easily
spin up another instance when I want to start fresh or try out other setups
like having a more powerful machine or something with a GPU. At work (I work
at AWS) most people do the same for their developer machines and don't have
physical desktops, just using their laptops for access or lightweight local
development.

A service that makes setting up and managing those developer machines easier
for folks who don't want to learn or fiddle with AWS options would be
valuable.

~~~
Aperocky
> learn or fiddle with AWS options

AFAIK if you only want a box to act as a dev environment, that would not be
much work beyond ec2:run-instance? Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?

~~~
dbish
standard installations (set yourself up with the tools you want running on the
machine), keeping track of and managing the security parts (security
keys/access credentials), mapping to any static IP or domain name you may want
to use for ease of access, and other niceties could make the process smoother
if you were purely focused on the developer workflow

~~~
dbish
also when you're testing things out on the machine you have to know how to
change security settings for opening ports and providing access externally.
These aren't too complicated to do, but just generally having simple tools/UI
for making this simpler could be useful. for example, if you're a flask dev
you may want to just run a site "locally" and make a few setting changes
before being able to access your site. i've helped friends with how to do that
before

------
fxtentacle
Lots of red flags. These guys apparently have very little clue what they're
talking about.

I mean "fast + virtual" already makes me doubtful. And I'm sure that with the
internet being overloaded by everyone working from home, using remote desktop
is going to be even more painful than usual.

But when they claim "Get a new computer in less than 5 minutes, zero
configuration required." and then mention 3ds max, I am 100% convinced that
they are clueless. Pretty much nobody uses the stock 3ds renderer, so you'll
need to install something like Redshift or V-Ray, too. And setting up the
plugin licensing alone will take you hours. Plus you have to re-do it every
time the underlying hardware of your virtual instance changes.

Oh, and then there's pricing. "P6000 For extreme 3D apps, rendering" starts at
50GB SSD? WTF? I have a 8TB storage raid here to keep the scene files around.
And then "Only pay for what you use" but "For hourly plans, if your machine is
powered off, you will only be billed for your storage."

OK, so you pretend to cater to 3D professionals, but you fail to mention
licensing, the number 1 cloud issue, you provide too little storage to load
even a hobby-sized rendering project, and your on-demand service will bill me
for storage unless I download and re-upload terabytes of data every time I
switch projects.

I'd say you can greatly improve your pitch by NOT promoting it as a
professional solution. It's probably great for hobbyists and gamers, so I
would focus on them with the marketing.

Oh and how are you going to be "Delivering every frame in less than 16.6 ms"
when there's 50ms of latency (due to speed of light) between me and your
closest server?

~~~
ktpsns
This is so true. I've done GPU heavy High performance rendering on remote VNC-
like connections, something which requires lot's of preparation time -- and
evventually you will be frustrated by working remotely.

------
soulnothing
I used paper space for remote gaming via Parsec. I also purchased one of their
machines for remote development purposes. While I was waiting for parts to fix
my laptop.

The service was really good. The machine was fast, with RDP it felt close to
local. They also offered very powerful hard ware.

I moved on because it was a bit pricey at that point. This was about a year,
year and a half ago. I think it was about 50 a month for me. I moved onto a
dedicated server that I used KVM and LibVirt to manage.

That worked but it's obviously a lot of over head.

~~~
scrumper
Signing up right now for this - glad to hear it worked well. I have a Mac at
home (not ideal for games) and at most a couple hours a week to do any gaming
(so it's not worth buying a PC). For the absolute best machine they have, my
outlay will be less than ten bucks a month. An easy sell.

~~~
azinman2
But won’t the latency kill gaming tasks?

~~~
scrumper
On the off chance you see this, I'm pleased to report that the answer is, no!
It works brilliantly as long as you use the free "Parsec" service's client to
access the desktop and your games. Browser access to the Paperspace desktop is
fine for normal app use but no good for gaming.

Setup wasn't quite push-button but I got it up and running by dumbly following
the instructions. Parsec was the most confusing part. Trust the docs, and
it'll work.

~~~
azinman2
What kind of games are you playing? I'm guessing for something like Quake,
particularly if you're good, even 50msec can throw things off...

~~~
scrumper
Mostly older FPS multiplayer games against friends. Garry's Mod, the Source
version of Counterstrike. Haven't seen any issues at all, really feels like
it's on local desktop (other than the quite obvious graphical degradation in
fast-moving play). I have a hardwired ethernet connection to my router though;
I bet it'd stink over Wifi.

Also - am not good. :)

EDIT the latency figures are nothing like 50ms though. Low tens maybe, total.
This isn't a huge surprise though: on the same machine and connection I've
also (using JamKazaam, not over Paperspace) had decent success doing online
realtime music jam sessions with local friends too, where the latency tops out
around 25ms - can't really get into the pocket playing funk, but just fine for
rock.

------
riazrizvi
Better known as 'Desktop Virtualization'. Established competitors in this
space are Citrix/XenDesktop, Microsoft/HyperV, Oracle/VirtualBox,
VMware/HorizonView used in combination with remote desktop clients like X11
and Remote Desktop Connect. Is there an angle here that is new and
interesting?

~~~
jabroni_salad
This is specifically "desktop as a service" so while there may be Xen or
Horizon in the mix it is abstracted away from the customer. The established
competitors are Amazon Workspaces and Azure Virtual Desktop.

------
bransonf
Curious what folks think the outlook on this technology is. Rather, will there
be any significant shift towards centralized compute in the next decade?

Currently, a large institution/corporation has to manage thousands of
individual machines. Say a physical component fails, now a technician must go
to the location of the machine and give the user a temporary replacement.
Alternatively, in a centralized compute environment, they could just allocate
a new machine, and work entirely out of a data center.

And what about software updates and upgrades?

In the centralized model, both software updates and hardware upgrades can be
managed more easily. Sure, we have good software tools to update all networked
devices, but if that fails, the admin still sometimes needs physical access.

One market I see this potentially taking off in is academia and hospitals.
(Though I’m biased because I’m employed by a Medical School)

Much of the record keeping is already done with a centralized infrastructure.
Liberal use of active directory and low powered clients is the norm.

And particularly for research, there’s the added benefit of being able to
allocate more resources without any physical action. Say I’m trying to run a
script to fold proteins on my lab workstation. Usually, I’d be limited to the
hardware on hand, but in the centralized model I could request or allocate a
more powerful machine. Sure, the current solution is to spin up your own VM
and move your program. Often, academic institutions have their own on-prem
compute for this purpose. However, both still require technical ability on
part of the user.

How close are we really to the model of giving all users a dummy client (think
Chromebook) and centralizing The real compute? What challenges, disadvantages
am I missing?

~~~
formercoder
Depends on latency requirements. Data analysis? Yep. Creative pros? Nope.

~~~
Bombthecat
Why? People are ok to play online via stream. Why shouldnt for work also be
ok?

------
cocktailpeanuts
This looks like a consumer targeted product. If so, they should use a "per
month" pricing instead of the per hour pricing which only caters to nerds who
will go through the trouble to calculate.

I hope it's actually an affordable option overall compared to any other
options out there.

~~~
mistersys
Clearly this is a product targeted to professionals, designed for using heavy
application while mobile.

Gaming is a also a use case, but gamers that run heavy games tend to be nerds
anyway.

Per month pricing would make it very hard to price competitively for users who
work 6+ hours a day vs. users who need to work with CAD files a couple of
times per month.

I don't know what kind of every-day consumers need to to run heavy CAD
software.

~~~
Legogris
I get mixed messages. The front page says

> Moving your workflow into the cloud gives you the best hardware and
> networking performance possible, and helps you work on the tough stuff a
> normal computer just won’t do.

This is then followed by their "Advanced" specs @ 6vCPUs, 16GB RAM and 2GB
VRAM. That's a mid-range laptop.

------
fataliss
Anybody used it for gaming? I was a beta user of the Nvidia service which is
dedicated to gaming and while overall acceptable, lag spikes would render the
use of the platform really frustrating. Everything would be smooth for 30s and
then "lag" or freeze for up to 1-2s and then resume. Fine if playing the sims,
but when you are in a fight in fast paced games it's a deal breaker. To my
knowledge, so far, no platform has figured out the proper streaming/input lag
management to make the experience truly seamless. Is this one different?

~~~
tonyhb
Yeah. I use it for work (healthcare, 3D simulations, GPU, our own custom apps
for treatment planning) and also for gaming. Would recommend with Parsec.

~~~
mistahchris
I agree. Parsec makes it excellent. I really like the Paperspace vm combo
there. Super easy to setup and I've noticed no issues. It's more expensive
than Nvidia's service (to which I also subscribe), but you can play whatever
game you want or do anything else you want.

------
isthisnametaken
"How does pricing work? For hourly plans you are charged a flat rate(depending
on machine type) per month to cover storage and access.

Am I charged when my machine is off? For hourly plans, if your machine is
powered off, you will only be billed for your storage."

Are those charges listed anywhere? They don't seem to be on the Workstream
pricing page.

~~~
TheKnack
Here's a link to the storage pricing. There are links on that page to pricing
details for just about any scenario.

[https://support.paperspace.com/hc/en-
us/articles/36000380433...](https://support.paperspace.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360003804333-Storage-Pricing)

The lowest level is 50GB for $5 per month

~~~
hedora
I wish there was a way to automatically nuke the image on shutdown, and then
spend 15 minutes to have a script auto-populate a few games in my steam
library at next boot. It’d save $5/month, and also solve the OS update
problem.

~~~
jedieaston
You can use the CLI to create/destroy instances, so what you could do is write
a script that has Chocolatey (or boxstarter, which is a bit more for this
purpose) install Steam, run it when you login, and then have another script
destroy the instance using the cli command.

A bit fiddly, but it'd work.

------
OkGoDoIt
So I read through the whole landing page and I don’t really understand what
this is. It sounds like it’s just another virtual private server? How is this
different from getting a VPS on any hosting provider and remote desktoping
into it? I guess since it’s paid by the hour rather than pay by month, but
generally a service like this charges you for every hour your virtual machine
exists, not just when it’s running. So unless you want all your data deleted
you’re going to be paying longer-term anyway. Or maybe that’s not the case,
they certainly don’t go into any detail to explain it one way or the other.

~~~
1023bytes
The benefit here is you pay a smaller fee for the storage and the machine
itself is created on demand.

------
ChuckMcM
First, that is a pretty nice web site. The notion of this sort of virtual
computer goes back a ways, the one thing I keep expecting to see but haven't
yet is a fully encrypted experience where the "cloud" bits don't work unless
the user's local display has a security token attached.

My first experience with type of architecture was in the 80's with something
called an "X terminal". All the same elements, a machine with a display /
keyboard /mouse that had a network protocol to talk to some hardware acting on
my behalf in a machine room. I could sit down at any station and open up my
desktop, just as I had left it. It is a pretty decent experience even with
only a 10mbit Ethernet network.

The second time I got to experience this architecture was in the Citrix days
(late 90's early 2000's) Now the OS was always Windows and the network
protocol was proprietary, but you could bring up an entire enterprise without
all that pesky installing/rebooting that was the life of an early Window's
system administrator. Also gave you control over employees trying to put bogus
software on the computer. No Netscape Communicator for you! Work work work.
:-)

Somewhere after Citrix imploded with all the problems that come with a walled
garden with razor wire on the walls, we started seeing deployments using
virtual machines and VNC. That gave you the "what you see is what is
happening" feel of Citrix but now you had a different choice of operating
systems and better vendor flexibility. VNC over a SSH SOCKS proxy replaced X11
over SSH as a more "universal" way of implementing this architectural design
pattern.

Of course Google gave us "the browser is the computer" with ChromeOS and now
the machine as a browser target where the browser is something more standard.

I like the architecture but in the previous iterations there was always some
big problem it was addressing, X terminals addressed mobility, Citrix
addressed enterprise configuration management, VNC/VM addressed multiple OSes
other than Windows while retaining enterprise configuration management, and
ChromeOS went for a better security model, mode-less configuration, and
minimal cost of entry.

What problem does Workstream address either better or differently than what
the above solutions address/addressed?

~~~
catblast
Citrix imploded? That’s news to me. It’s pretty much an industry standard in
US healthcare.

~~~
third_I
I would like a minute of silence for all sysadmins working in healthcare.
Having to deal with COVID on top of a Citrix infrastructure (if it can be
called that) must be... well need I say more. Working with Citrix.

(PS: I'm joking, I hope the product has become stellar. It very much was not
back in the day when I had 200 users on it).

------
KingOfCoders
What I wonder, is there a special cloud service for compilation? Compilation
is a spike in IO and CPU and most of the time nothing (and I don't mean a
build server, but an exported file system I can edit on my computer and
compile very fast in the cloud).

------
tone
Looks quite interesting. I could really use a Windows box that I could use for
a few games while I'm isolated not at home with only my Macbook Pro.

~~~
dudul
Why use this over GeForce Now? Really curious, I don't see a lot of
advantages.

~~~
al_chemist
Paperspace supports* Linux client, GeForce Now does not.

* allegedly. Tried to set up Paperspace and Parsec without result.

~~~
naravara
If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much? If anything I
would think this would be for someone who has a Linux setup but wants to
access games that aren't available.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much?"_

It really depends on the game.

For instance, Factorio, which is enormously popular on HN, has a perfectly
functioning Linux version. Many other games do too, and some games even
perform better on Linux than on Windows, not to mention having a better user
experience on Linux (especially if you are technical and know what you're
doing).

I have an old Linux laptop, and Factorio performs well enough in single
player, but I run in to serious performance issues on multiplayer. It's be
nice to be able to run this Linux game on a more performant Linux machine,
without shelling out the $$$ for a new gaming rig.

Further, I'd like to avoid Windows as much as possible, where it can be
avoided.

------
hedgehog
It doesn't look like this is launched yet, at least I don't see it when I log
in. I've been happy with their notebook product Gradient though, and it will
be interesting to see if latency is good enough for this to replace some local
desktop usage.

~~~
dkobran
Sorry for the confusion here, we are in the midst of separating out the two
products and this is not reflected everywhere yet. Under the CORE section of
the interface, you'll find these instances and you can download the desktop
app here: [https://paperspace.com/download](https://paperspace.com/download)

~~~
raywu
How's native peripheral support? I've been looking for a cloud solution that
would act as a virtual rig for VR. However, from everything I read there's
hardware limitation on memory to support meaningful peripheral throughput. I'm
curious about what you and DTE have come across!

~~~
bonezie
What kind of VR hardware are you using? I'm working on a cloud based virtual
computer solution that leverges google's additive GPUs (You can add as many as
you want to facilitate what you need to do).

~~~
raywu
That sounds awesome! I don't have a VR rig set up and am looking to build a PC
and have some spec I can share. How do you hook up VR peripheral with the
cloud?

~~~
bonezie
The idea is that the VR hardware would have a companion software, and that
this software can be run on the could-computer (where all the heavy lifting is
done) and displayed through a browser on the basic device that you already
have.

So in your case - instead of personally fronting the costs for a whole lot of
VR ready hardware, you can just pay for a powerful virtual computer (with as
much Ram and GPU power as you want for your task).

Connecting your own assets/files to the cloud-computer can be done via cloud
storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

------
RIMR
I've been using Paperspace Air machine since they first launched (still paying
early bird prices too) and their basic Windows VM is pretty amazing.

I'm mostly a Linux/Mac guy, but I spend a few hundred hours per year logged
into my Paperspace machine and almost always have it doing something for me.

It's perfect for getting access to your own toolchain on any computer. And
it's got plenty of resource to give it time-consuming jobs to do. It has just
enough GPU to give it an edge over some of my cheap VPS options.

It was perfect when I was contracted out to a highly restrictive corporation
and couldn't access my own employer's tools due to firewall policy. The
browser-based remote desktop always worked.

------
localhost
I'm curious what others here are paying for a cloud VM for dev tasks. My
current favorite VM size on Azure is Standard_NC6_Promo that includes a K80
GPU, 56GB RAM with 8 vCPUs for $0.39/hour.

~~~
azinman2
When you say dev tasks, are you talking about machine learning? What dev tasks
do you need 56G of ram for?

I’m trying to figure out who these products are for. 0.39/h * 8h = $3.20/day,
or approx $70/working month. And that’s on top of buying the computer you have
to connect to this, with the annoyance of extra latency in all tasks. I can
see the use of occasional demanding tasks using very large VMs on inexpensive
computers, but I don’t see how it works out in the long term if that’s your
man machine that you always live out of.

~~~
localhost
Sorry - yes ML tasks. The pricing is on par with a D8v3 but offers more RAM
and a GPU, but likely with slower CPU perf (though I haven't benchmarked the
machine).

My laptop doesn't have a discrete GPU, so I can't do any ML tasks on it so
running a Jupyter server on a remote VM is my way of doing those tasks.

------
nodesocket
Does it support snapshotting a machine after you configure it and install all
your custom software then create a new machine from the snapshot?

~~~
gnade
Yes! Sorry this isn't more obvious: [https://support.paperspace.com/hc/en-
us/articles/236402867-T...](https://support.paperspace.com/hc/en-
us/articles/236402867-Templates)

------
pizza
Any chance for more zones for paperspace? Wanted to use them for a cloud
gaming host, but they don't have any regions in Los Angeles

------
jsumrall
Not a heavy user, but I've been using Paperspace a few times for gaming. They
make it really easy. They have a "template" you spawn a new instance from, or
use a blank windows install. Their template is handy since it has Steam and
Parsec already installed.

What they seem to be doing here is saying you don't need Parsec and can just
use their browser implementation instead.

Sounds great!

~~~
ShamelessC
Is gaming well supported with controllers working over the air?

~~~
hedora
I’ve had good luck. The biggest hiccup was that you need to pay extra for a
public IP.

Super Meat Boy is about as twitchy as I get, and the latency for that is fine
(at least in the SF bay area).

Obviously, the GPU can do more than that, but I haven’t tried pushing in that
direction.

------
dalore
I use Paperspace's core compute machines for my IDE and dev machines. It's
great not having to run everything local, can use a cheap low end laptop
locally but still have a beast dev machine. If I end up hosing my dev I can
just start it from the last snapshot.

Granted could probably do this with any host/cloud infrastructure. But I'm
happy with it.

~~~
blablabla123
That's also how I use it. I tried other hosters but for dev use, theirs is
particularly nice because it's much cheaper. Also I like the user interface ;)
Unfortunately I didn't try Gradient yet but Core already has so many
possibilities...

------
zaptheimpaler
As a computer-savvy dev, i feel like its hard to beat building your own given
how cheap & powerful desktops are today, and how good software is.

Workstream specs are - 6 CPU, 16GB RAM, 2GB graphics card, 256GB SSD.

You could build a desktop beating that for around $800 today - including a
Ryzen 3600, motherboard, case, better GPU etc. At $0.18/hr for Workstream,
that means after just 44 hours you breakeven on building your own machine.

With a little extra work on setting up VNC/RDP/Parsec you can then access this
desktop from anywhere. I already do this and it works great for the most part.
The streaming app/protocol is key, and thanks to teams like Parsec and
Moonlight we have high quality software doing this for free.

\----

But given their target market, this does look really cool. Amazon Workspaces
costs 3x-4x more for comparable machines with Windows. Paperspace looks like
its offering OSX and some good bundled software for designers, VFX etc.

~~~
marbogast40
$800 / $0.18 per hour = 4444.4 hours

I think you did: $800 / $18 per hour = 44 hours

Pretty big difference! Curious, does this change your value assessment?

~~~
zaptheimpaler
Oh good catch! That works out to 185 days so it won't change anything, my pc
will last a lot longer than that.

But then again, even a much lower cost wouldn't change things for me. For one
I completely own my pc and can do anything I want on it, second I know it's
secure & private and my data won't be used in ways i might not know about, and
third there's no internet latency on input/output which is nice for gaming
etc. I could go on but yeah I feel like it's clear owning is generally better
than renting for many reasons

~~~
stevens32
185 days of continuous use.. for many 4000 hours is easily a decade worth of
gaming

------
delgaudm
This is a new world to me... I'm looking to learn a GPU intensive application
like Davinci Resolve before committing to a new machine to run it locally --
would this be an appropriate solution, and would it obviate the need for the
local machine, i.e. can I do everything on this that I could do locally?

------
runaway
Would something like paperspace be a good platform for software development?
My slow computer doesn't handle IntelliJ that well. Instead of buying a new PC
I could rent this for a few hours at a time.

------
TACIXAT
I really like the idea of Paperspace and I've tried to get going a few times
on the free plan but I hate notebooks. I didn't fully understand the server +
gpu offerings, which is what I want. I would love it if I could just get an IP
to scp some scripts to, then ssh in and run them. I don't think it's possible
to get billed only for GPU time when you're running it this way though, so it
would be pricey to keep the server up.

------
e12e
> How does pricing work?

> For hourly plans you are charged a flat rate(depending on machine type) per
> month to cover storage and access. Additionally, you are charged an hourly
> rate when the machine is running. Monthly plans are offered at a flat rate
> for unlimited access.

Then the pricing page doesn't list the flat rate, when looking at hourly
pricing - but does show an hourly price for monthly billing? Possibly
monthly/(30 * 24)?

Ed: looks like hourly for monthly plan is calculated as monthly/(365÷12×24)

------
mleonard
Hi. Developer and part-time computer science high school teacher here. Does
Workstream support graphical desktop linux machines, or only terminal? Thanks!

------
Brajeshwar
Vagon[1] is another interesting solution tackling to solve a similar problem.

1\. [https://www.vagon.io](https://www.vagon.io)

------
vinaynadig
I use Paperspace for running Fusion360 which is a CAD application. I use a
Linux laptop and there are no really good CAD applications in Linux space(I
tried FreeCAD but Fusion 360 is so much easier to use though). Works like a
charm and extremely light on the wallet(I bill roughly 15 ~ 20 USD per month
with around 40 to 60 hours of usage). It's been a godsend so far.

------
Sir_Substance
I'm curious about something because I'm working on a side project that's "in
the area".

How does workstream, or indeed any remote computing provider, handle the
possibility of people using their service to attack other computers, or to
store/transfer extremely illegal data? They're not exactly running KYC
identification.

~~~
Havoc
There are probably easier and cheaper way to do that.

All sorts of player offer storage without kyc and for attacks this isn’t
really what you’d want either

------
preya2k
Can somebody highlight the difference between this new "workstream" product,
and their regular "core" VMs?

------
fao_
This actually seems like a game changer. Access to machine learning /
developer rigs at incredibly cheap prices?

------
TimTheTinker
Do Workstream VMs come pre-installed with the pro software they mention in the
blurb? If so, this sounds compelling.

------
newfeatureok
Is there something like this that's self-hosted?

My ideal scenario is something like this that's $20/month for unlimited usage,
with the caveat that you have to have the server in your own house with your
own internet, but the service is that it provisions your machine and proxies
it for fast speeds everywhere.

~~~
vageli
If the goal is gaming, GeForce Now and Moonlight are amazing. You can also get
a remote desktop via GeForce Now but probably better just to use remote
desktop.

------
pkos98
I have to recommend [https://shadow.tech](https://shadow.tech)! It is a
Windows VM intended specifically for (but not limited to) gaming! And it works
extremely well, I am playing games on it for ~ 2 years by using their client
app on Linux.

~~~
jplayer01
I only recently got mine last week and I love it. The CPU is a bit
underpowered but the GPU is so much better than what I have in my PC and I’ve
been able to play a bunch of more recent games that I wasn’t able to before.
Also much prefer the freedom to install what I want over services like GFN or
Stadia.

------
rubatuga
Signed up for a paper space account about a year and a half ago, they had a
dark UI pattern to stop people from deleting their VMs, and it kept charging
me every month with no method to stop it. After a month or too, they changed
their UI to allow deleting the VM.

------
corenting_
Another interesting solution for this is : [https://shop.shadow.tech/usen/pre-
order](https://shop.shadow.tech/usen/pre-order) . They are currently expanding
to some countries including the US.

~~~
ec822
+1 on Shadow!! - I would definitely recommend Shadow. You get a full instance
of Windows 10 to do anything you want (I primarily game). I wrote a quick
review of it, including 3dmark scores for the base version here:
[https://medium.com/@ec822/playing-in-the-
cloud-d0c023b77bdd](https://medium.com/@ec822/playing-in-the-
cloud-d0c023b77bdd)

------
pqdbr
I created an account to try some gaming (I'm on a Mac), but they require
writing a message to access any GPU enabled machines.

Is [https://www.paperspace.com/gaming](https://www.paperspace.com/gaming)
deprecated?

------
taigi100
I've used perforce in the past both for work & gaming. Gotta say, awesome
experience!

------
jasonlingx
Are there services like these that also “rent” the software (aside from the
OS) licenses to you? I wouldn’t mind paying a pro-rated license for sharing
photo or video editing software for example.

------
laurentdc
I think the pricing section has a few mistakes under Monthly

$1343 / hour

$1.84 effective hourly price

~~~
dkobran
Nice catch, typo (the values are correct but the text said "/hour" instead of
"/month").

Disclosure: I work on Workstream

~~~
Legogris
I really wish that the monthly flat rates were included when hourly prices are
quoted on the pricing page and with "only pay for what you use" on the front
page. Right now it's very easy to get a first impression of feeling misled.

------
peter_d_sherman
This is a really great idea!

I wish you a lot of luck in this endeavor!

Any plans for a free, ultra-lightweight tier of service? You might be able to
get more paid subscribers over time that way...

------
chrismckleroy
What is the min mbps upload speed required for success here?

------
sabujp
this works out to ~$375/yr for their advanced plan if you figure 8 hr work
days and 261 working days per year
([https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+work+days+per+year](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+work+days+per+year)).
How does this compare vs an equivalent instance with some kind of remote
desktop running on a cloud service?

------
MR4D
Can someone clarify something for me please?

Is this (and others like it) just a new Citrix-type system? Or is this
actually something new that changes the game?

------
ugh123
Whats not clear is do I still pay for it when i'm not using it, but can
restore processes and provisioned apps when I need to get back on?

------
ffhhj
Are there solutions that don't care about user location? Getting "not
available in your country" from Shadow and Nvidia Now.

------
paulpauper
How is this different from virtual windows or Linux machine. You can run
software remotely this way without having to buy a new computer

------
BiteCode_dev
With all those websites preventing you to use tor, you can use tor to connect
to this, and this to connect to whatever you need.

~~~
snazz
You can also set up a SOCKS proxy on a much cheaper basic VPS as well, giving
you the advantage of using a web browser on your local computer instead of
dealing with the overhead of a completely virtualized desktop.

------
rock_artist
While interesting, it would’ve been great if they had a simple test no signup
instance to evaluate responsiveness.

------
netcraft
I've looked around the site but im still confused - It looks like its a
windows OS? Is there an iPad client?

~~~
preya2k
You can use it in the browser, or install any RDP/VNC Server you want on the
Windows system. So yes, there are probably multiple iPad clients.

~~~
netcraft
oh yeah, I didnt consider youd connect to it through standard RDP clients.
Thanks!

------
ccktlmazeltov
Is this a look at our future? Everybody will just connect to a more powerful
computer in the cloud?

~~~
ship_it
Probably. I even saw Xbox being used as a cloud computer rather than console.
[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCloud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCloud)

~~~
ccktlmazeltov
I actually play my playstation games online with PS Now.

------
ComodoHacker
What about software licensing? Today I need Office, tomorrow I might need
3DStudio.

------
RMPR
There's no cloud it's _literally_ someone else's computer

------
dvfjsdhgfv
For people who have used it: is credit card the only payment option?

------
andybak
No RTX/Turing GPUs?

My first thought was "Hey - I can try out Minecraft RTX!"

------
stevefan1999
It is nothing other than being a fat client that works in the browser.

------
dsalzman
I’m relishing the switch back to the thin client / main frame model, but I
want to own my main frame. Even if it physically sits in a company’s data
center. With 5G we are getting closer to disposable glass thin client
interfaces.

------
b1gtuna
I only see Gradient and Core. Where is Workstream? Neat idea!

~~~
andy47
Same here, signed up but the only choices are Gradient or Core. What is, or
where is, Workstream?

------
quadrature
this looks awesome. I wish i could rent machines preloaded with the
applications i use. but i guess the incentives for the licensers aren't
aligned there.

~~~
d23
My thoughts exactly. If I could just rent photoshop for a few hours that would
serve my needs perfectly. But it looks like I'd need to buy a license, load it
on, and pay monthly for storage, so I might as well just pay for just the
application and use it locally.

------
deegles
What's the AWS equivalent to their biggest instance?

~~~
dpau
I'd like to see a cost comparison across different providers. A comparable
v100 machine on Google Cloud is $2.015/hr, while Paperspace seems to charge
2.30/hr for a dedicated v100
([https://www.paperspace.com/pricing](https://www.paperspace.com/pricing))

~~~
dkobran
Google Cloud is very sneaky with their pricing as they don't include the
instance itself in the advertised GPU pricing. Here's an instance very
comparable in specs (8 vCPU, 30GB RAM, 1 V100, 50 GB SSD):
[https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=a9fbcab5-cb...](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=a9fbcab5-cbce-4a2c-b2a4-765a2bafd92a)
It's $3.19/hr. The Linux version is $2.87/hr.

~~~
dpau
Thanks for this link, I've been going by the estimated cost on the Google
Cloud VM deployment page which seems to give significantly lower prices than
your link. With GC I always seem to end up paying a lot more than I planned
to...

------
rodolphoarruda
Is there a service like this for Linux desktop users?

~~~
thekyle
AWS Workspaces supports both Windows and Linux desktops.

------
zelly
Back to the future.

------
6510
Maybe some benchmarks?

~~~
downerending
Well, "super fast" would seem to imply at least 10 terahertz...

------
ajiang
Anything?

------
betoharres
laughs in tmux

------
blatchcorn
I already have a fast computer

------
the_arun
Why do you need to use a Virtual Computer when you already have a
laptop/desktop you use to connect to this Virtual Computer? What am I missing?
Is it only for folks connecting from Chromebooks?

~~~
32gbsd
Its a subscription service. People want subscriptions.

