My organization does thin clients and I'm a big fan. It would be nice to have smaller quieter and more energy efficient ones, but I'm sure it was cheaper to keep what we have. I never have problems with software not being up to date or something going wrong. Just new problems like if there are network issues I can't do any work (was still a problem before moving to thin clients). I also like that I can just use my computer at home and log in and have everything set up like I'm at work.
I didn't downvote, but I can think of a few reasons.
1) It doesn't add anything to the conversation. Yes the NSA watches everything in some way, saying so is redundant.
2) Presumably the connection is encrypted, so the NSA just sees a long lived connection between your and an Amazon data center.
3) Actively pulling data off of a privately owned server inside the US is a bit (but only a bit) of a stretch for what we know about what the NSA does.
I really like thin clients, but it seems like a solution that really lost traction. I remember using SunRay terminals, with 50 to 100 people on a single Sun server and it just worked.
Jump to today: Microsoft Terminal Server is pretty much what people expect when talking thin clients/remote desktop and it's just no nowhere near as good as the Solaris solutions back in the early 2000s. I really miss those "old" Unix solutions, it just worked.
I've done something similar for years, all my files are mounted on my drive with sshfs. Whether I'm at home or work everything is available to me and when I'm done I log off my VPN and all my sensitive documents unmount and "disappear", what's left is just a few applications... Sublime, chrome etc... Works great.
Worked on Workspaces at AWS for about a year, on the software clients in particular. I think their product has potential but for the moment is limited by some underlying technology decisions made in the interest of a quicker go-to-market.
I would not be surprised if at some point soon their underlying tech became all first-party and we saw some significant improvement. There are plenty of resources throughout AWS that with some work could be composed into a better stack than the 3P pieces and protocols they use currently.
I don't think I've disclosed anything here that isn't already public knowledge, past my own wild speculation based on zero knowledge of internal workings since my departure. If anyone has any questions that I can answer without endangering myself to NDA issues, I'd be glad to answer about Workspaces.
I think it's a great product for those who benefit from it; I ended up leaving the team because while the technological challenges were interesting, I couldn't put myself in any potential users' shoes, and therefore really couldn't drum up much organic passion of my own.
Is there any possibility of insuring that Workspaces will be accessible to users of assistive technology? I use a WIndows PC because that's what has the best screen reader support, a quick google search didn't turn anything up about running a screen reader in the workspace and having it's sound piped back to the thin client.
coincidentally, that's what I was doing in march, and... surprisingly, it sort of worked.
client had JAWS, and the JAWS installer read itself to me while it was installing - I was rather impressed. Had to reboot, and it never came up after that - assuming it was related, but never figured it out.
The NVDA screen reader did work, as well as the windows voice assistant thing itself. both would generate audio in the workspace, and I was hearing it over my el capitan local setup.
The Jaws problem may have been video card drivers. Jaws installs it's own video driver that I have found to not work under Virtualbox unless guest additions are installed. I could see there being something in the Amazon virtualization solution that could cause problems with the driver.
I wanted to dig in to a bit further, but the client just reset the whole thing and said "you don't get JAWS now". Project cancelled soon after that - unrelated to JAWS/workspace.
Don't have time now, but hopefully it will be resolved at some point. NVDA was 'good enough' for the testing I was doing, and it was pretty slick to know the audio was streaming and working without any extra configuration. Probably old hat for some folks, but I'd never experienced that before. :)
I love that this idea never goes away (in my first real career job, I supported actual dumb terminals that we replaced with desktops). It never seems to take off either, but it's always just about to. I don't mean to criticize! WorkSpaces sounds pretty great.
The first time was in a startup company. We hired a brilliant and unconventional sys admin who was somewhat reminiscent of the Gilfoyle character in "Silicon Valley". After being hired, he took a few weeks to analyze how the user groups worked. Then he disappeared into his work room for a few weeks, often working late into the night. When he finally reappeared, he had set us up so that our desktops were running apps from the Windows servers. (At the time, we used Windows 3.51 on the server with Novell ?Netware?.) I ran everything from Powerbuilder to an Oracle standalone instance to Word (or Wordperfect) from the server. When I needed additional tools, he was very cool about installing them.
The second time was at a training session at Sun Microsystems' Burlington, MA campus. My first day they handed me a key card. The card allowed me access to the building and rooms I was authorized for. I also needed it for access to workstations. I could go up to any workstation in the lobby and authorized rooms, insert it into a card reader, and instantly have my desktop appear in the state I left it in during my last session. It was a fully graphical desktop. Absolutely eye-opening experience working there for a few days. It spoiled me. I've been looking for that experience again, but haven't found it.
In the end, it always boils down to network reliability, latency, and loss of power/control, which is where you pay for the convenience you get from thin terminals.
The control issue in particular will come back, it's human nature. Centralised environments are locked down to a level that someone eventually finds intolerable, so they start using unsupervised local hardware. It's the natural anarchy of the human spirit... or a reaction to the stupidity of people in power :)
It's been one of the pendulum swings in IT... actually the company I work for has dumb terminals for most of its employees, and the people in charge of support are very happy (users, not that much).
> One morning I sent the team an email with the provocative title “My WorkSpace has Disappeared!” They read it in a panic, only to realize that I had punked them, and that I was simply letting them know that I was able to focus on my work, and not on my WorkSpace.
"Jokes on them I was only pretending!"
Do people actually do this in a corporate setting?
I'll assume that this is just fluff for the sake of being able to post an advertisement under the guise of a blog post.
I wrote the post and I can assure you that I actually did this. Our internal slogan is "Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History." I try my best to do all three.
This was not fluff, it was my actual story.
Also, this is a corporate blog and I am part of the marketing department.
Every workplace has their dynamics, and I don't know what your team is like. I didn't think you'd read that comment, but you did, and unfortunately it took your comment for me to realize the degree to which that comment is mean-spirited. I'm sorry for that, and it doesn't reflect well on me.
I do stand by what I'm saying there, though. One of my first bosses treated email as sacrosanct, and that rubbed off on me. His workflow was centred around his email queue, and email was the official ledger. If we talked about an idea, the first thing I did afterwards was put it into writing and email it. He had a newborn and was busy as hell, but he always got his job done.
With conversations that touch several separate groups, and with people who are responsible for a lot of different things, email becomes the common denominator. All it takes is one "URGENT!!!!" subject line to throw someone off-kilter. If that turns out to be a joke, you've interrupted them for nothing. And for very busy people, that can add up and be the difference between catching their bus home to see wife and child. It probably seems a bit melodramatic to liken it to directly taking away time spent with family, but I think it's a reasonable common courtesy to leave all jokes outside of the most formal form of written communication.
Not a big deal for a rare joke or an email that stays within a couple people, and that's what this sounds like. But the principle is something that I appreciate.
As long as your use cases are covered sufficiently and you're fine with cloud'ing your environment completely, I guess this can work.
But I much prefer being self-reliant and not at the whim of a company for things like my computing environment. This is why I run free/open source Unix variants and Linux and rely on applications whose config I can copy and reuse across machines. Add NixOS on top and you have yourself a one command setup on a new machine, if you desire so. If I don't own the environment myself and understand it, I cannot fix problems when they come up and they will, unfortunately.
Definitely targeted at the enterprise, but it's entirely possible to provision and operate a single instance without any kind of enterprise-level agreement.
Thanks for answering! Other providers for OS X solutions are super dodgy / shutdown / involve time sharing (no imaging, you store everything into a personal Dropbox).
I ask about OS X support as the requirement for OS X to run Xcode kills a lot of iOS development workshops as the cost is to high / device availability is low.
As a (primarily) iOS developer by trade, I feel your pain. There are colocation operations that seem to do well. They involve racks and racks of Mac minis hanging out in a datacenter somewhere -- since it's Apple hardware, it's totally acceptable within OS X licensing terms. It costs more, of course, but it might be a valuable investment to an operation that relies on a volume of machines to be available and shareable while staving off concerns about wear and tear.
I'm with MacStadium and we just acquired Macminicolo. Let me know if you have any questions. We've got large enterprise customers, developer shops, and popular SaaS tools like Travis CI using our dedicated rented Mac servers and Mac private cloud platform.
Apple's included screen sharing tool is a Mac-specific solution. At MacStadium, we provide iRAAP server on our dedicated Mac servers for customers connecting from Windows computers; it allows for RDP access to the remote Mac.
OK, so Workspaces appeals to me (C# developer for a small company, no IT team, working from home) as redundancy - at present, if my laptop goes bang everything is backed up in "the cloud" (be that Azure, S3, somewhere) but it's the time getting everything restored like the multiple Visual Studio versions I need, the connectors for SSRS report designer etc. that I can see Workspaces working out for me (laptop goes bang, borrow my wifes one, connect to Workspace, carry on as if nothing happened until I can get a replacement)
However ... Workspaces looks like it needs an Enterprise AWS subscription ($15k/month?) so what alternatives are there for someone like me, where someone takes care of providing a Virtual Desktop, making sure it's running, backed up, connectable from anywhere (obviously with me responsible for ensuring off-site backup of any code/deliverables as I am at the moment) or is it best just to run up my own VPS with Win2k12 or similar and use that?
EDIT Ignore that, I was getting a weird redirect where trying to subscribe to WorkSpaces was taking me to the Support Subscription page, and just would not let me subscribe to WorkSpaces, but it appears to have sorted itself out now
Not sure where you saw that you need an Enterprise AWS subscription. I didn't.
I tried Workspaces for a month and it was decent. There are a few things it does better than RDP (especially on OS X). I did, however, switch to running Windows Server 2012 R2 on Azure instead, though that was because it was effectively free thanks to BizSpark.
Ah, I was getting a loop saying "You need to subscribe to Workspaces" which would then take me to choosing a subscription which after selecting the Basic (free) one would take me back to saying "You need to subscribe to Workspaces" but it _appears_ to be fixed now :)
Any noticeable latency differences between RDP to Azure and AWS Workspaces? I've noticed that the modern.ie free instances, for example, do have a noticeable amount of lag.
I have almost no latency issues with RDP in Azure. I can watch a YouTube video with no major latency. Workspaces wasn't terrible in that regard but definitely not as smooth.
The Azure machine is a bit beefier than Workspaces, so that probably factors into it.
The $15k seems to be for enterprise-level support, which wouldn't be needed for trying out the service (you'd probably want a high level of support if downtime in the service literally prevents your entire office from doing work, of course).
If I move my PC to the network room and instead use remote desktop (I'm on Windows almost all the time now), don't I get pretty much the same experience?
Had to use workspaces on a client project a few months ago. There was some bizarre issue between El Capitan and the remote desktop which would send most of my keystrokes to the remote instance, even when the focus was not on the Workspace window.
I'd somewhat narrowed the behaviour to any 'messaging' system - slack, skype, messages and some others - if I switched to slack or responded to an osx 'messages' notice, my keystrokes would also be sent to the Workspace, and generally cause havoc. I'd leave an IDE open, switch to slack to talk to the client, come back, and all the code was replaced with our conversation.
There seemed to be reports of some similar behaviour with a windows client last year, and it was supposed to be 'fixed', but I never saw any reports of similar OSX behaviour.
Like amazon we can only offer Windows 7/2008 as part of our licensing. We will offer Windows 10/2016 as soon as it becomes possible to do so. In the meantime, we offer a BYOL option that allows you to run whatever you want on our cloud
As a software engineer that works across multiple platforms, I've used Amazon Workspaces as my primary Windows dev environment for the past 18 months. In general the experience is great- the input response and 2D graphics are superior to an RDP session. It's easy to forget you're working remotely. Another nice bonus is longer battery life relative to running a virtual machine on your laptop.
But the real limitation is the tiny C: partition. It's fixed at 60 GB, nearly half of which consumed by Windows and its gradual updates, which generally leaves you with insufficient space to install Visual Studio with the Xamarin tools.
The limitation has been noted in the AWS Developer forums, but unfortunately the 60 GB limitation seems hard-wired into the platform for now[1]. It's painful enough that I searched around for alternatives, but I couldn't find any direct competitors! I'd be 100% happy with this if I didn't have to run up against this 60 GB limit all the time. Just a heads-up for any engineers considering this for a Windows development environment.
I've been experimenting with something vaguely similar in the form of getting a ChromeBook and using a Nitrous VM for programming projects.
I initially used (and preferred) Koding, but their shift away from solo accounts made me switch. I find it very strange that they have such a good core product that they could simply focus their efforts there and instead so much of their effort seems aimed at building an integrated slack / hipchat / .. competitor. They could integrate with them and have much a better selling point.. I digress..
It's oddly unburdening to not have any projects on your laptop but at the same time have the ability to access them whenever from any machine. I firmly believe it's the future.
Same here: I have experimented with nitrous.io for programming and using a Chrome based editor that works with DropBox and Google Drive for editing my leanpub book project -- all on a Chromebook. The advantage is that this setup works on any laptop or PC I sit down in front of. My only complaint about nitrous.io is that their web IDE does not work on my iPad Pro with Apple keyboard.
Quite a convincing description! I can really dig the overview and description of transition and use case scenarios. Kind of makes me chuckle to see a Dummy Terminal return, I mean, cough, Zero Client. The more things change, right?
As a quite satisfied user of Amazon's StoryWriter program online I can really agree the ease of access and stability of the resource provides value. I've moved from CelTx at this point, and will probably even import to Amazon from that.
A friend is experimenting with Amazon's VideoDirect system as well, so I hope to hear about that experience. He did mention the need for Closed Captioning took some effort to find a suitable online tool (there are some good free ones) and the large file uploads for HD video isn't the most fun, but so far, so good.
For some reason, Amazon has targeted some of the creative sector in ways that Google and Facebook I don't think quite understand how to set up. Sure, both have some dominant platforms and tools (YouTube, "Artist Pages") but these new-ish developments by Amazon seem to be sticking the landing pretty often.
Gotta say though, I like seeing this admission:
>I do still run PowerPoint locally, since you can never know what kind of connectivity will be available at a conference or a corporate presentation.
Nice. Every little defense against Murphy's Law in presentation/performance is a wise move in my experience.
Funny thing, I need to use an amazon workspace from time to time for my job. I've managed to keep 100% Linux (for my personal boxes) professionally and at home for a good long time now, but a specific (and thankfully rare) access requirement was solved by using a Windows Amazon workspace.
Guess what? No Linux workspaces client.
So now to gain network access to a particular resource (a web address), I run the Windows workspaces client under Wine under Linux, which gives me access to a properly virtualized Windows workspace, which gives me access to a web address that is hosted on Linux.
It would be a comic tragedy except that it was so damn easy to make it work, and it works very well.
I dunno, as a dev you can just docker your environment and if your Macbook air dies, you buy a new one, and simply pull your images and your back to work in minutes.
Even setting up a mac from scratch for me only takes an hour, and I run an array of different web-apps.
An hour lost at worst once a year isn't worth much to me.
- WorkSpaces provide users with the Windows 7 Experience, provided by Windows Server 2008 R2.
Suits only a windows user - lets say you need a ubuntu machine; the EC2 m3.large similar to the "Performance" workspace bundle. The difference between AWS Workspace and AWS EC2 is huge ($48), while AWS Workspace will cost you $60, EC2 Machine with same configuration will cost you $108.
But the advantage with the EC2 machine - is you should be able to shutdown the machine when not in use, so a 50 Hour/Week will cost you only $39, that is $21 less than the AWS Workspace. So any AWS workspace single user who can use Linux Machine does not benefit from AWS Workspace.
Generally speaking the difference is in the client you connect to the system with. Most "VDI" solutions deal extremely well with latency/packet loss. A standard VNC connection... not so much. If you're just using a CLI it probably is a wash, but for a GUI there's a pretty big difference.
I checked out Amazon Workspace a few months to see if I could get rid of one of my laptops. Alas, my client's VPN caused issues. I opted for creating a vm and accessing it through the web via Guacamole. I can get to my machine from anywhere. http://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/
History truly does repeat itself. Shall we go over the shortcomings and problems with thin clients again?
Network problems mean you are screwed.
Even short of full on connectivity loss, if you're suffering congestion or packet loss for whatever reason, a thin client can quickly become unusable. Right now I work remotely a lot, from accessing remote git repositories to doing work on c9.io (which I love.) But if I do suffer network problems, I can work locally. It's not a full on loss of productivity.
Yes network ubiquity, reliability and speed has never been better than it is today. But it is not 100%. Especially if you live in a rural area like I do.
Datacenter problems mean you're screwed.
Datacenter suffer outages too. Even AWS. Again, with a traditional client you can cope with it. With a thin client you are totally hosed.
As with network issues, there are lots of datacenter problems that aren't full on outages. Hardware and otherwise.
Even Thin Clients suffer obsolescence.
One of the tried and true dreams of thin clients is that they don't go obsolete. Anyone who has been on this rodeo before knows that's just not true. Network connectivity gets better, display connectivity gets better, power usage improves, etc. And with today's desktop and laptop speeds improving at the snail pace they do, a thin client really isn't offering any bonus here. If you buy a good laptop or desktop today it's going to last you years and years. (The MacBook I'm typing on now is 4 years old and showing no signs of age.)
It is slower.
Despite this raving endorsement (totally unbiased I'm sure.) Thin clients that have to reach out across the network for every action are always going to be slower than a machine that doesn't. The network is always adding latency. Whether that bothers you or not largely depends on your own tolerances and what you are doing.
There's a reason thin clients always make a comeback and people are excited for a while and then realize "Oh wait I want a traditional machine again please." This cycle has happened so many times.
114 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadSincerely,
NSA
If someone who didn't downvote this wants to speculate, please let me know.
The downvoting is sometimes spot on, but sometimes it seems a little arbitrary.
IMHO, rboyd was just pointing out the potential privacy issues in a humorous way.
1) It doesn't add anything to the conversation. Yes the NSA watches everything in some way, saying so is redundant.
2) Presumably the connection is encrypted, so the NSA just sees a long lived connection between your and an Amazon data center.
3) Actively pulling data off of a privately owned server inside the US is a bit (but only a bit) of a stretch for what we know about what the NSA does.
Jump to today: Microsoft Terminal Server is pretty much what people expect when talking thin clients/remote desktop and it's just no nowhere near as good as the Solaris solutions back in the early 2000s. I really miss those "old" Unix solutions, it just worked.
I would not be surprised if at some point soon their underlying tech became all first-party and we saw some significant improvement. There are plenty of resources throughout AWS that with some work could be composed into a better stack than the 3P pieces and protocols they use currently.
I don't think I've disclosed anything here that isn't already public knowledge, past my own wild speculation based on zero knowledge of internal workings since my departure. If anyone has any questions that I can answer without endangering myself to NDA issues, I'd be glad to answer about Workspaces.
I think it's a great product for those who benefit from it; I ended up leaving the team because while the technological challenges were interesting, I couldn't put myself in any potential users' shoes, and therefore really couldn't drum up much organic passion of my own.
client had JAWS, and the JAWS installer read itself to me while it was installing - I was rather impressed. Had to reboot, and it never came up after that - assuming it was related, but never figured it out.
The NVDA screen reader did work, as well as the windows voice assistant thing itself. both would generate audio in the workspace, and I was hearing it over my el capitan local setup.
Don't have time now, but hopefully it will be resolved at some point. NVDA was 'good enough' for the testing I was doing, and it was pretty slick to know the audio was streaming and working without any extra configuration. Probably old hat for some folks, but I'd never experienced that before. :)
Although it is getting so close.
Dropbox and drive sort of get you to a half-way point solution.
The first time was in a startup company. We hired a brilliant and unconventional sys admin who was somewhat reminiscent of the Gilfoyle character in "Silicon Valley". After being hired, he took a few weeks to analyze how the user groups worked. Then he disappeared into his work room for a few weeks, often working late into the night. When he finally reappeared, he had set us up so that our desktops were running apps from the Windows servers. (At the time, we used Windows 3.51 on the server with Novell ?Netware?.) I ran everything from Powerbuilder to an Oracle standalone instance to Word (or Wordperfect) from the server. When I needed additional tools, he was very cool about installing them.
The second time was at a training session at Sun Microsystems' Burlington, MA campus. My first day they handed me a key card. The card allowed me access to the building and rooms I was authorized for. I also needed it for access to workstations. I could go up to any workstation in the lobby and authorized rooms, insert it into a card reader, and instantly have my desktop appear in the state I left it in during my last session. It was a fully graphical desktop. Absolutely eye-opening experience working there for a few days. It spoiled me. I've been looking for that experience again, but haven't found it.
The control issue in particular will come back, it's human nature. Centralised environments are locked down to a level that someone eventually finds intolerable, so they start using unsupervised local hardware. It's the natural anarchy of the human spirit... or a reaction to the stupidity of people in power :)
https://outrunchange.com/2011/11/05/the-computing-pendulum-h...
"Jokes on them I was only pretending!"
Do people actually do this in a corporate setting?
I'll assume that this is just fluff for the sake of being able to post an advertisement under the guise of a blog post.
This was not fluff, it was my actual story.
Also, this is a corporate blog and I am part of the marketing department.
I do stand by what I'm saying there, though. One of my first bosses treated email as sacrosanct, and that rubbed off on me. His workflow was centred around his email queue, and email was the official ledger. If we talked about an idea, the first thing I did afterwards was put it into writing and email it. He had a newborn and was busy as hell, but he always got his job done.
With conversations that touch several separate groups, and with people who are responsible for a lot of different things, email becomes the common denominator. All it takes is one "URGENT!!!!" subject line to throw someone off-kilter. If that turns out to be a joke, you've interrupted them for nothing. And for very busy people, that can add up and be the difference between catching their bus home to see wife and child. It probably seems a bit melodramatic to liken it to directly taking away time spent with family, but I think it's a reasonable common courtesy to leave all jokes outside of the most formal form of written communication.
Not a big deal for a rare joke or an email that stays within a couple people, and that's what this sounds like. But the principle is something that I appreciate.
But I much prefer being self-reliant and not at the whim of a company for things like my computing environment. This is why I run free/open source Unix variants and Linux and rely on applications whose config I can copy and reuse across machines. Add NixOS on top and you have yourself a one command setup on a new machine, if you desire so. If I don't own the environment myself and understand it, I cannot fix problems when they come up and they will, unfortunately.
The homepage[1] makes it seem very enterprise heavy.
[1]- https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/
I ask about OS X support as the requirement for OS X to run Xcode kills a lot of iOS development workshops as the cost is to high / device availability is low.
Thanks again for taking the time to answer.
The standard, and original, is: https://macminicolo.net
I'm sure there are others.
However ... Workspaces looks like it needs an Enterprise AWS subscription ($15k/month?) so what alternatives are there for someone like me, where someone takes care of providing a Virtual Desktop, making sure it's running, backed up, connectable from anywhere (obviously with me responsible for ensuring off-site backup of any code/deliverables as I am at the moment) or is it best just to run up my own VPS with Win2k12 or similar and use that?
EDIT Ignore that, I was getting a weird redirect where trying to subscribe to WorkSpaces was taking me to the Support Subscription page, and just would not let me subscribe to WorkSpaces, but it appears to have sorted itself out now
I tried Workspaces for a month and it was decent. There are a few things it does better than RDP (especially on OS X). I did, however, switch to running Windows Server 2012 R2 on Azure instead, though that was because it was effectively free thanks to BizSpark.
The Azure machine is a bit beefier than Workspaces, so that probably factors into it.
The $15k seems to be for enterprise-level support, which wouldn't be needed for trying out the service (you'd probably want a high level of support if downtime in the service literally prevents your entire office from doing work, of course).
You could also just run everything on a VM locally and back up snapshots of the VM.
I'd somewhat narrowed the behaviour to any 'messaging' system - slack, skype, messages and some others - if I switched to slack or responded to an osx 'messages' notice, my keystrokes would also be sent to the Workspace, and generally cause havoc. I'd leave an IDE open, switch to slack to talk to the client, come back, and all the code was replaced with our conversation.
There seemed to be reports of some similar behaviour with a windows client last year, and it was supposed to be 'fixed', but I never saw any reports of similar OSX behaviour.
But the real limitation is the tiny C: partition. It's fixed at 60 GB, nearly half of which consumed by Windows and its gradual updates, which generally leaves you with insufficient space to install Visual Studio with the Xamarin tools.
The limitation has been noted in the AWS Developer forums, but unfortunately the 60 GB limitation seems hard-wired into the platform for now[1]. It's painful enough that I searched around for alternatives, but I couldn't find any direct competitors! I'd be 100% happy with this if I didn't have to run up against this 60 GB limit all the time. Just a heads-up for any engineers considering this for a Windows development environment.
[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=220618
I initially used (and preferred) Koding, but their shift away from solo accounts made me switch. I find it very strange that they have such a good core product that they could simply focus their efforts there and instead so much of their effort seems aimed at building an integrated slack / hipchat / .. competitor. They could integrate with them and have much a better selling point.. I digress..
It's oddly unburdening to not have any projects on your laptop but at the same time have the ability to access them whenever from any machine. I firmly believe it's the future.
As a quite satisfied user of Amazon's StoryWriter program online I can really agree the ease of access and stability of the resource provides value. I've moved from CelTx at this point, and will probably even import to Amazon from that.
A friend is experimenting with Amazon's VideoDirect system as well, so I hope to hear about that experience. He did mention the need for Closed Captioning took some effort to find a suitable online tool (there are some good free ones) and the large file uploads for HD video isn't the most fun, but so far, so good.
For some reason, Amazon has targeted some of the creative sector in ways that Google and Facebook I don't think quite understand how to set up. Sure, both have some dominant platforms and tools (YouTube, "Artist Pages") but these new-ish developments by Amazon seem to be sticking the landing pretty often.
Gotta say though, I like seeing this admission:
>I do still run PowerPoint locally, since you can never know what kind of connectivity will be available at a conference or a corporate presentation.
Nice. Every little defense against Murphy's Law in presentation/performance is a wise move in my experience.
Guess what? No Linux workspaces client.
So now to gain network access to a particular resource (a web address), I run the Windows workspaces client under Wine under Linux, which gives me access to a properly virtualized Windows workspace, which gives me access to a web address that is hosted on Linux.
It would be a comic tragedy except that it was so damn easy to make it work, and it works very well.
https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/faqs/#Clients_User_Experie...
"Q: Can I use any other client (e.g., an RDP client) with Amazon WorkSpaces?
No. The only supported clients for WorkSpaces are the free clients provided by AWS."
If you use public IP addresses, just use that.. or leapfrog rdp through an ssh tunnel or VPN on a linux instance on the same VPC.
Something like this, to tunnel through a linux instance:
Even setting up a mac from scratch for me only takes an hour, and I run an array of different web-apps.
An hour lost at worst once a year isn't worth much to me.
- WorkSpaces provide users with the Windows 7 Experience, provided by Windows Server 2008 R2.
Suits only a windows user - lets say you need a ubuntu machine; the EC2 m3.large similar to the "Performance" workspace bundle. The difference between AWS Workspace and AWS EC2 is huge ($48), while AWS Workspace will cost you $60, EC2 Machine with same configuration will cost you $108.
But the advantage with the EC2 machine - is you should be able to shutdown the machine when not in use, so a 50 Hour/Week will cost you only $39, that is $21 less than the AWS Workspace. So any AWS workspace single user who can use Linux Machine does not benefit from AWS Workspace.
Network problems mean you are screwed. Even short of full on connectivity loss, if you're suffering congestion or packet loss for whatever reason, a thin client can quickly become unusable. Right now I work remotely a lot, from accessing remote git repositories to doing work on c9.io (which I love.) But if I do suffer network problems, I can work locally. It's not a full on loss of productivity.
Yes network ubiquity, reliability and speed has never been better than it is today. But it is not 100%. Especially if you live in a rural area like I do.
Datacenter problems mean you're screwed. Datacenter suffer outages too. Even AWS. Again, with a traditional client you can cope with it. With a thin client you are totally hosed.
As with network issues, there are lots of datacenter problems that aren't full on outages. Hardware and otherwise.
Even Thin Clients suffer obsolescence. One of the tried and true dreams of thin clients is that they don't go obsolete. Anyone who has been on this rodeo before knows that's just not true. Network connectivity gets better, display connectivity gets better, power usage improves, etc. And with today's desktop and laptop speeds improving at the snail pace they do, a thin client really isn't offering any bonus here. If you buy a good laptop or desktop today it's going to last you years and years. (The MacBook I'm typing on now is 4 years old and showing no signs of age.)
It is slower. Despite this raving endorsement (totally unbiased I'm sure.) Thin clients that have to reach out across the network for every action are always going to be slower than a machine that doesn't. The network is always adding latency. Whether that bothers you or not largely depends on your own tolerances and what you are doing.
There's a reason thin clients always make a comeback and people are excited for a while and then realize "Oh wait I want a traditional machine again please." This cycle has happened so many times.