
Amazon WorkSpaces - kaishiro
https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces
======
jweir
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.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
>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
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.

------
bane
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_.

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

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

~~~
mhurron
This made me laugh - ".. or to meet IT requirements to not have company data
on end user devices"

Ya, just put it on Amazon's servers instead. That's way better.

~~~
Touche
Isn't it? Amazon's server team is way better than your company's.

~~~
mhurron
I don't usually wave the flag, but no, they aren't. They might be comparable,
but not better.

------
scottlinux
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...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/adminguide/client_help.html)

~~~
nknighthb
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...

------
eli
Is there something new about WorkSpaces?

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

~~~
bxgde9
It just went GA today: [http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/03/amazon-workspaces-
now-ava...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/03/amazon-workspaces-now-
available.html)

------
wil421
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
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?

~~~
wil421
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.

~~~
r00fus
It's not a circle, but extruded along a timeline represents more of a
spiral/helix.

------
runako
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?

~~~
aganders3
Maybe the impending EC2 price drop (predicted by many in light of the new
Google cloud pricing) will bring it in line.

~~~
aganders3
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/](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/effective-april-2014/)

------
kayoone
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.

~~~
afhsfsfdsss88
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
I seriously doubt this claim that the network costs will be at all
significant.

~~~
afhsfsfdsss88
So the access providers will change their behavior on the basis of your
serious doubt?

Will they add new infrastructure and absorb that cost without price increases?

Netflix's issues with ISPs is actually a counter example to my position?

As time goes on, we'll use less data rather than more?

Video[GUIs are video] require a lot of transfers even when you have good
connections/protocols. I do remote work[a lot] and I have a typical uplink and
it stinks. I use CLI/SSHFS as much as possible to avoid lags and it is still
laborious.

~~~
kayoone
Still on the other hand things like Onlive/Gaikai realtime game streaming are
really quite impressive and responsive. But they obviously had cost issues as
well and it remains to be seen when that experience would be possible in real
1080p at a high bitrate. Not even thinking about 4K here...

------
davidw
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
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?

~~~
YZF
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.

------
dn2k
"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.

~~~
rufugee
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)?

~~~
bdcravens
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.

------
jpdus
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
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
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...

------
alecsmart1
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".

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

------
ehPReth
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)?

------
mhw
Hmm; one interesting bit is WorkSpaces Sync -
[https://sync.amazonworkspaces.com/](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
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](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"

------
pjmlp
OS/360 is back!

~~~
mhurron
It never left

[https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Z/OS](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Z/OS)

It's just not _cool_

~~~
pjmlp
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.

~~~
mhurron
Brush up your resume, you're going to be hot again.

------
driverdan
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?

~~~
bdunbar
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.

------
sailfast
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.

------
geoffc
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
According to Wikipedia
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_as_a_service](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
Ambiguity as a Service (AaaS)™

~~~
BrandonMarc
We May Provide Whatever You Need!

------
odonnellryan
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 ;)

~~~
EvanAnderson
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.

~~~
odonnellryan
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.

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

[http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/officemaster/#content](http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/officemaster/#content)

------
esw
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6726962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6726962)

------
subdane
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.

------
josephjrobison
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?

------
TazeTSchnitzel
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).

------
sjs382
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?

~~~
bdcravens
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.

~~~
sjs382
Do you happen to know the name of the vendor that does this?

~~~
bdcravens
I Googled a received a few results - I want to say the terms I used were "osx
vps"

------
veidr

        (T_T) Waaaaah:
    
        REGION UNSUPPORTED
    
        WorkSpaces is not available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo).
        Please select another region.

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

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

~~~
kylemaxwell
Except Azure VDI is already a thing.

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

------
foobarqux
Is there a free demo to try?

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

------
tillinghast
IE9?

------
jdorfman
and this is why I left IT

