I love the concept. Anybody knows if there are similar offerings from Azure or Google Cloud?
I love my Amazon Workspace
21–30 of 115 posts
Re: I love my Amazon Workspace
#22OK, 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.
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 :)
Re: I love my Amazon Workspace
#23OK, 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…
On Azure I believe your MSDN entitlements carry over so you could create a VM on Azure and keep it offline until you need it.
Re: I love my Amazon Workspace
#24I took a quick look, but it's not for me. It's Windows only, and tops at 2 vCPUs, 7.5 GB of RAM, and 100 GB of storage.
Re: I love my Amazon Workspace
#25OK, 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…
Where are you seeing the Enterprise AWS subscription requirement? Looks like pricing is per-user and rather reasonable: https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/
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).
Re: I love my Amazon Workspace
#26OK, 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…
Huh? You can run it separately and afaict, install whatever you want on it. A co-worker of mine ran workspaces for a while for $20-30 a month.
You could also just run everything on a VM locally and back up snapshots of the VM.
Re: I love my Amazon Workspace
#27I 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.
Case in point: "The Network Is The Computer"...
Re: I love my Amazon Workspace
#28OK, 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.
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.
Re: I love my Amazon Workspace
#29I 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.
That was my first thought, too. It's the Network Computer again!
Re: I love my Amazon Workspace
#30OK, 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…
You could copy your disk to an external drive and boot from that, or you could copy the files from the external drive into the laptop's drive.