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I love my Amazon Workspace

aws.amazon.com

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Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#11

Post by projectramo »

rboyd wrote: post #6
spaceisballer wrote: post #2

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 co…

We're glad it's working for you. Sincerely, NSA

Purely out of curiosity: why did people downvote this comment?

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.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#13

Post by projectramo »

matt_morgan wrote: post #7

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.

Same. (I love it too).

Although it is getting so close.

Dropbox and drive sort of get you to a half-way point solution.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#15

Post by jeffbarr »

nickysielicki wrote: post #9

> 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…

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.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#16

Post by kfullert »

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

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#18

Post by lallysingh »

projectramo wrote: post #11
rboyd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're glad it's working for you. Sincerely, NSA

Purely out of curiosity: why did people downvote this comment? 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.

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.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#19

Post by commandshift90 »

jareds wrote: post #8
commandshift90 wrote: post #5

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 tha…

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.

I would imagine that if the screen reader running on the Workspace itself outputs its audio to the standard audio output, you would have no problems.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#20

Post by ianhawes »

kfullert wrote: post #16

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 ban…

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.

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