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Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

workstream.paperspace.com

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Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#151

Post by Aeolun »

woah wrote: post #78

I've used Paperspace's Gradient product (hosted Jupyter notebooks), and while it is cheaper than most other options, I can't recommend it. The service has a very janky feel. When I first started, there was an issue where my instance was was stuck "shutting down" for half an hour or more and I couldn't access my code. Then there was a weird issue where some kind of geographical split between different types of instanc…

Lol, yeah, I had the same issue. Followed their advertising for ‘gaming in the cloud’, only to find out that the VM’s with GPU’s were disabled. Not going to do any gaming without a GPU guys.

Eventually they enabled them, but it was such a pointless experience that I was completely turned off using it.

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#152

Post by djhworld »

riazrizvi wrote: post #135

Better 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?

> Is there an angle here that is new and interesting?

It seems like a turn key solution without much tinkering?

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#154

Post by Aeolun »

fataliss wrote: post #132

Anybody 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 h…

I have used it for gaming and I can’t say I ever had an issue like that. I haven’t used it for very long though.

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#155

Post by NullPrefix »

DTE wrote: post #104
woah wrote: post #78

I've used Paperspace's Gradient product (hosted Jupyter notebooks), and while it is cheaper than most other options, I can't recommend it. The service has a very janky feel. When I first started, there was an issue where my instance was was stuck "shutting down" for half an hour or more and I couldn't access my code. Then there was a weird issue where some kind of geographical split between different types of instanc…

CEO of Paperspace here. I'm really sorry about this. That is not the experience that we are striving for and FWIW, since leaving beta, Gradient is much more mature at this point (many millions of hours of runtime and lots of developer work). We have been aggressively stabilizing (and building out new features) over the past few years and continue to improve the product every release. My sincerest apologies for your n…

Do you have some sort of "fair use" policy for GPU instances? Is it OK with you to peg them at 100% usage all the time?

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#156

Post by dbish »

somethingwitty1 wrote: post #150
dbish wrote: post #123

I think there is a market here. I don't use this service, but instead use an EC2 instance as my developer box (for personal projects) and I do like being able to easily move between multiple machines, no matter where I am and easily spin up another instance when I want to start fresh or try out other setups like having a more powerful machine or something with a GPU. At work (I work at AWS) most people do the same fo…

https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/ perhaps? Seems like that is the existing AWS option similar to this offering. Would neat to see a comparison between the two.

workspaces (in my personal point of view) would cover a chunk of what this company is talking about but doesn't tie into or focus on the developer workflow. that product is perfect for general office machines, but developers likely want the option for more control and need different features

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#157

Post by rcxdude »

Aperocky wrote: post #127
dbish wrote: post #123

I think there is a market here. I don't use this service, but instead use an EC2 instance as my developer box (for personal projects) and I do like being able to easily move between multiple machines, no matter where I am and easily spin up another instance when I want to start fresh or try out other setups like having a more powerful machine or something with a GPU. At work (I work at AWS) most people do the same fo…

> learn or fiddle with AWS options AFAIK if you only want a box to act as a dev environment, that would not be much work beyond ec2:run-instance? Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?

Yeah, but even for fairly technical people, there's a lot more of a learning curve there than there needs to be (starting up an instance is easy, getting all the security stuff set up is more of a pain). Having something which is easier to manage without all the complexity of AWS seems reasonable.

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#158

Post by dbish »

Aperocky wrote: post #127
dbish wrote: post #123

I think there is a market here. I don't use this service, but instead use an EC2 instance as my developer box (for personal projects) and I do like being able to easily move between multiple machines, no matter where I am and easily spin up another instance when I want to start fresh or try out other setups like having a more powerful machine or something with a GPU. At work (I work at AWS) most people do the same fo…

> learn or fiddle with AWS options AFAIK if you only want a box to act as a dev environment, that would not be much work beyond ec2:run-instance? Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?

standard installations (set yourself up with the tools you want running on the machine), keeping track of and managing the security parts (security keys/access credentials), mapping to any static IP or domain name you may want to use for ease of access, and other niceties could make the process smoother if you were purely focused on the developer workflow

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#159

Post by mjayhn »

draebek wrote: post #76
dudul wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use this over GeForce Now? Really curious, I don't see a lot of advantages.

I hear that, after it left beta, the number of games that you can play on GeForce NOW is greatly reduced. I have read that you can no longer play arbitrary games from your Steam library (like you could in beta), and furthermore, a few major publishers have pulled their games from the service. So the advantage of Paperspace would be that you can play many more games than you can on GeForce NOW.

I don't know how to show you an actual list compared to my Steam library but I only know a handful of games that have been removed (The Longest Dark was big drama a few weeks ago) but I'm sitting here testing a bunch of my most popular games (Bannerlord, DOS2, POE2, Destiny 2, LOL, Space Engineers, etc) and I haven't hit a game yet that I can't play.

Some publishers have been very anti-competitor regarding it and taken down their entire libraries but there is still a ton to play.

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#160

Post by NullPrefix »

z3t4 wrote: post #120
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No cookies, no ads, source code always available, pay for a prebuilt version, user names price ... in excess of $100k/year (after 20 years :) ... ardour.org

Thinking about going open source but too afraid of hostile forks. How do you prevent people from stealing the business?

By hostile you mean stolen GPL and included into proprietary tech? Or another, competing GPL product?
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