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Amazon Now Renting Cloudy Desktops for $0.22 an Hour

posted by CoolHand on Saturday August 20 2016, @08:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the your-face-is-cloudy dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Amazon Web Services' "Workspaces" desktop-as-a-service offering can now be paid for by the hour.

Workspaces are a cut of Windows Server 2008 with a Windows 7 skin and are consumed with a custom client application. Until today, the service was sold by the month for a fixed price that included storage.

That's now called the "Always On" mode. There's now also a new "AutoStop" mode in which desktops shut down after you disconnect for a certain amount of time. AWS promises that desktops will emerge from AutoStop in 90 seconds, complete with all data.

[...] The service still needs a device running Windows, Android, iOS, Amazon's own Fire or Chrome OS. There's still no Linux client, which seems an oversight as those considering Workspaces on a PC would surely like the chance to run them without having to worry about Windows licences. Nor is there a way to use Workspaces on a thin client or Raspberry Pi, arrangements that look like matches made in cloud desktop heaven.

But why grump about such things on the day that slightly slow and weird desktops became something that can be rented by the hour? Truly we live in an age of wonders .... ®

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @11:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @11:10AM (#390546)

    From Amazon Workspaces FAQs:

    they will need a supported client device (PC, Mac, iPad, Kindle Fire, or Android tablet), and an Internet connection with TCP ports 443 & 4172, and UDP port 4172 open.

    So Android tablets and iPads are supported but not phones. Also Mac is supported but ChromeOS is not mentioned here.

    But the answer to the Multi-Factor Authentication question says:

    MFA is available for Amazon WorkSpaces client applications on the following platforms - Windows, Mac OS X, Chromebooks, iOS, Kindle, and Android.

    So ChromeOS is supported.