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I love my Amazon Workspace

aws.amazon.com

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Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#31

Post by mgkimsal »

Had to use workspaces on a client project a few months ago. There was some bizarre issue between El Capitan and the remote desktop which would send most of my keystrokes to the remote instance, even when the focus was not on the Workspace window.

I'd somewhat narrowed the behaviour to any 'messaging' system - slack, skype, messages and some others - if I switched to slack or responded to an osx 'messages' notice, my keystrokes would also be sent to the Workspace, and generally cause havoc. I'd leave an IDE open, switch to slack to talk to the client, come back, and all the code was replaced with our conversation.

There seemed to be reports of some similar behaviour with a windows client last year, and it was supposed to be 'fixed', but I never saw any reports of similar OSX behaviour.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#32

Post by mrweasel »

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…

I really like thin clients, but it seems like a solution that really lost traction. I remember using SunRay terminals, with 50 to 100 people on a single Sun server and it just worked.

Jump to today: Microsoft Terminal Server is pretty much what people expect when talking thin clients/remote desktop and it's just no nowhere near as good as the Solaris solutions back in the early 2000s. I really miss those "old" Unix solutions, it just worked.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#33

Post by ianhawes »

btown wrote: post #28
ianhawes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have almost no latency issues with RDP in Azure. I can watch a YouTube video with no major latency. Workspaces wasn't terrible in that regard but definitely not as smooth.

The Azure machine is a bit beefier than Workspaces, so that probably factors into it.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#36

Post by commandshift90 »

AJRF wrote: post #12

Is there something like Workspaces for consumers? The homepage[1] makes it seem very enterprise heavy. [1]- https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

Definitely targeted at the enterprise, but it's entirely possible to provision and operate a single instance without any kind of enterprise-level agreement.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#37

Post by commandshift90 »

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…

Jeff is definitely genuine here. Can confirm. He's a fun guy.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#39

Post by NuclearFishin »

As a software engineer that works across multiple platforms, I've used Amazon Workspaces as my primary Windows dev environment for the past 18 months. In general the experience is great- the input response and 2D graphics are superior to an RDP session. It's easy to forget you're working remotely. Another nice bonus is longer battery life relative to running a virtual machine on your laptop.

But the real limitation is the tiny C: partition. It's fixed at 60 GB, nearly half of which consumed by Windows and its gradual updates, which generally leaves you with insufficient space to install Visual Studio with the Xamarin tools.

The limitation has been noted in the AWS Developer forums, but unfortunately the 60 GB limitation seems hard-wired into the platform for now[1]. It's painful enough that I searched around for alternatives, but I couldn't find any direct competitors! I'd be 100% happy with this if I didn't have to run up against this 60 GB limit all the time. Just a heads-up for any engineers considering this for a Windows development environment.

[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=220618

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#40

Post by mkohlmyr »

I've been experimenting with something vaguely similar in the form of getting a ChromeBook and using a Nitrous VM for programming projects.

I initially used (and preferred) Koding, but their shift away from solo accounts made me switch. I find it very strange that they have such a good core product that they could simply focus their efforts there and instead so much of their effort seems aimed at building an integrated slack / hipchat / .. competitor. They could integrate with them and have much a better selling point.. I digress..

It's oddly unburdening to not have any projects on your laptop but at the same time have the ability to access them whenever from any machine. I firmly believe it's the future.

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