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.
Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything
131–140 of 255 posts
Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything
#132Anybody 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?
Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything
#133I'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.
Which product is this? I cant seem to find it myself in Azure. Virtual Desktop? I can only see buttons asking to contact sales
Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything
#134Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything
#135Better 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?
Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything
#136So 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…
The benefit here is you pay a smaller fee for the storage and the machine itself is created on demand.
Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything
#137I'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.
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.
Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything
#138I 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…
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.
But won’t the latency kill gaming tasks?
Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything
#139Better 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?
Also, AWS and GCP
Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything
#140First, 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?