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Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

theverge.com

171–180 of 198 posts

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#171
post #123

"significant demand", "sold out", etc. Considering this is microsoft and theverge, this "news" story is just paid PR/ad like so much of these type of stories are.

One could see i that way, i would see it as: Microsoft has still problems with scaling ;)

Artificial scarcity isn’t really Microsoft’s thing. To your point, their clients are militaries, world governments, etc. They’d never risk their standing on meeting demand whenever/ wherever for a marketing ploy.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you use a lot of contractor developers, being able to provision out devices for temporary work is powerful. A lot of time is spent provisioning machines, white listing ips, setting up VPNs, and getting the contractor to the point where they can work. In some cases I've seen it take 2 or 3 weeks to get a contractor up and running on a 6 month contract. Being able to give them credentials to a machine that's ready…

Okay, now I'm just laughing out loud. My org has an internal/external reputation for not exactly being fast moving and having convoluted IT processes, yet we can onboard people within a few days. If it takes you 2-3 weeks to onboard ANYONE please realize that your IT processes are complete, unmitigated garbage. Paying Microsoft for some Windows VMs through the nose isn't going to change anything about that.

>If it takes you 2-3 weeks to onboard ANYONE please realize that your IT processes are complete, unmitigated garbage.

I want to redirect this to a certain authority in The Netherlands, but I might get shot. It takes more than month to onboard and even then, you still need to do something extra to get certain rights.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#173
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have an 8core laptop with 32gig RAM for $700? That's not super common though, I think usually you'd spend more like $2500-$3000k for it. Count in the reduced maintenance and hardware support + having your whole stuff in one place.. Might make sense if you are not super low on money

Not quite 700$ but I recently bought a Laptop with a Ryzen 5700u (8 cores, 16 threads) and upgraded the RAM to 40Gb. Easily under 1000$ brand new.

So your RAM runs on Single channel mode. makingbl it's "speed" worse.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#174
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking about Microsoft and Google - two of the largest computing companies on the planet. By the same logic, you could say that game streaming is like a search engine, because some of the companies that do the latter are also doing the former. The idea of provisioning remote cloud VMs is far older than Stadia or Xbox Cloud anyway.

I am not talking Microsoft or Google. There are lots of smaller companies that provide this service. Your point about game streaming being like a search engine is nonsensical.

Exactly, just because two or more companies offer both game streaming and VMs doesn’t necessarily mean that those things are similar.

They may be, or may not be, but your logic to say that they are similar isn’t right (otherwise other product lines must be similar by extension).

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#175
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 365's lowest tier, with only 2GB of RAM, works out to $288/year. If you're on a Mac, you can grab the Pro version of Parallels for $99USD/year and run it locally, and spin up an instance of any version of Windows you need, along with guaranteed uptime and availability. I really don't see Windows 365 as a viable option for most developers, when there are so many better -- and cheaper -- alternatives readily av…

Not disagreeing with you, but just a note that with the M1's being ARM based, the Windows 10 will also be ARM based and may not run the necessary software for you to test with. For example, I know currently Visual Studio will not run on that.

> The Windows 10 will also be ARM based

Parallels is magic and runs both ARM and x86 windows apps

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#177
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AWS started offering resources for free, then they'd have to pause it within 4h since announcement and I'm pretty optimistic I think

...they offer a ton of stuff for free.

They have a wide berth of items, with varying levels of free-ness... and none of it to an extent that would cause a resource drain like this.

All of AWS free tier is either low impact resource wise (Couple thousand emails out per day, or metered to the lowest option, like a single t2.micro (Shared CPU, 1GB ram)

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#178
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite 700$ but I recently bought a Laptop with a Ryzen 5700u (8 cores, 16 threads) and upgraded the RAM to 40Gb. Easily under 1000$ brand new.

So your RAM runs on Single channel mode. makingbl it's "speed" worse.

From what I understand it's still dual channel for the first 8Gb, no? Not ideal but if I ever feel the need I could get another 32Gb stick and make it dual channel.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#179
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to policies from frustrating departments, people tend to find workarounds, especially if there is no easy way to enforce the rules. At a prior company, one of the only reasons we adopted anything SaaS was that IT didn't have to know it existed.

Ohhh man/woman. I'm a security person. I often work with my customers' central IT. I'm not going to have an opinion or judge you, but consider: You're giving people nightmares. I've seen it go very wrong (front-page news wrong). And then the threads commenting on "how incompetent can they be, blabla". I've worked with the people stressed, sad and disappointed that they got pwned because of shadow IT. It's a ticking t…

I've been in security in various roles for a while now and what I've found is, in companies where IT is treated as a cost centre and Security say no to stuff, Shadow IT will always be rampant.

If you put someone in business into the position of choosing between getting their job done/making money and adhering to a set of IT/Security rules, I can tell you which one they'll take :)

How do you avoid this? Well it's not easy and it's not cheap. The most important part is ensuring that IT isn't treated like an expense, but an enabler. then you work with your business teams to make sure they have the services they need to get the job done, as safely as possible.

Security teams shouldn't be blockers, but advisors. for this to work, it needs to be acknowledged that the business leaders own the risks ofc.

That's massively easier to write than do, but from what I've seen of various companies, it's pretty much the only way to have a chance of doing things without huge amounts of shadow IT.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#180
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ohhh man/woman. I'm a security person. I often work with my customers' central IT. I'm not going to have an opinion or judge you, but consider: You're giving people nightmares. I've seen it go very wrong (front-page news wrong). And then the threads commenting on "how incompetent can they be, blabla". I've worked with the people stressed, sad and disappointed that they got pwned because of shadow IT. It's a ticking t…

> You're giving people nightmares. I've seen it go very wrong (front-page news wrong). And then the threads commenting on "how incompetent can they be, blabla". I've worked with the people stressed, sad and disappointed that they got pwned because of shadow IT. It's a ticking time bomb. Who cares about front-page news wrong lol. Equifax was front-page news wrong, and there were 0 actual consequences for people in it.

And of course before a breach, every company thinks "that won't happen to me".

I'm sure that breach was expensive to Equifax internally, but as you say 0 external consequences mean, what company will change their ways...?

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