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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 .... ®
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:29PM
In my rant above I'd been thinking about a $100–$300 refurbished laptop with specs that are much less than the virtual machines being offered, but that's not quite right either. Amazon will sell me a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad with not bad specs for just under $130 [soylentnews.org]. (That's not bad at all, might have found my new laptop.)
$27/month in the article linked from TFA [theregister.co.uk] ($324/year) gets me specification #1: virtual CPU, 2GB RAM, 10GB storage. $130 gets me a Thinkpad, which I'll need anyway to access the service, with Intel Celeron 1.86GHz, 2GB RAM, 80GB Hard Drive, Windows 10 Home 32bit??? As you'd indicated, something doesn't entirely add up there.
Well, not so fast. If I wanted to grab that Thinkpad and go “freelancer” tomorrow and see the country living the lifestyle in my other comment, what else comes on my $324/year cloudy desktop?
- In addition, you can pay $15.00 extra per month for Microsoft Office Professional.
Ok, we're now at $504/year. I can also put LibreOffice, which I've been using for over a year at work seamlessly alongside Microsoft Office users, on my Thinkpad without even installing Linux. So that'll go on my cloudy desktop as well.
WorkSpaces ties in with several other AWS services. You can integrate with on-premises Active Directory via Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud combined with a VPN connection. There is also a WorkDocs Sync client which lets the user synchronize documents across two or more computers, including their WorkSpace. WorkDocs, once called Zocalo, is a document storage and collaboration service.
What does all that, er, do? Am I also paying even more for this VPN and this other, more cloudy cloud? $240/year gets me that and much more from Linode. But that must be the trick. I see that getting prices on all that from Amazon after the first-year-is-free deal is going to take some effort, but I think we can safely assume it's less than a full-blown Linode VM. If we also assume that my $324/year cloudy desktop includes those services for free, that number makes a bit more sense.
If I'm only planning on a one year excursion using this service, my cost for DIY with my Thinkpad and Linode is $370. For Thinkpad + Cloudy it's $454. That's closer but still doesn't make sense for somebody with technical skills. My $240/year Linode has just over twice the storage capacity as Cloudy.
So, while I don't know if this service is of any use to people who comment here, let's look at what value it has for the less technically minded “freelancer.”
- Professional administrators, maybe?
WorkSpaces still does not offer any assistance with patch management. "You can use any standard software deployment and management tool that you can run on Windows 2008 server," AWS evangelist Ian Massingham told The Reg, which is another way of saying you are on your own.
Well crap.
- Amazon's other cloudy services, maybe, which are administered by professionals?
- Reliable pre-configured virtual machine in a datacenter that won't lose power and is hopefully at least on RAID of some kind?
- (Before somebody shouts RAID isn't backup! at me, proper off-site backup would be the bullet above about Amazon's cloudy services, which we use at work and are very reasonably priced.)
- Hardware maintained by professionals in the datacenter?
But I suppose as I read on, we finally get to the scenario where this makes any sense at all.
…Although it may seem expensive considering the relatively low cost of a real desktop PC or laptop, in certain scenarios WorkSpaces can make good sense. The biggest WorkSpaces customer, said Massingham, is Johnson & Johnson, which has 16,000 employees and contractors on a BYOD (bring your own device) basis, and a further 8,000 thin client devices. "No Johnson & Johnson data leaves the AWS cloud," Massingham observed.
Apparently in the New Economy, I now need to buy that Thinkpad in order to have the privilege of working as a cog in the bloated, labyrinthine healthcare delivery system as agent #12,293 who gets paid to find all possible reasons your premiums need to go up again or why the latest doctor's visit isn't included in the policy. Or maybe I'm still part of the corporate panopticon disbursing the “incentives” that J&J offers for coughing up your precious bodily fluids and keeping your metrics (cholesterol level, etc) in line. I suppose I could also be a health coach, involved in other “incentives” that J&J offers that are a bit less cynical, things like weight loss or quit smoking.
(Ok, they do much more than just health insurance.)
No matter how I look at it, it's depressing. I should sign off and go do something productive.