I love my Amazon Workspace

#1

Post by ShaneOG » Wed, May 18, 2016, 12:45 PM UTC

I love my Amazon Workspace
aws.amazon.com

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#2

Post by spaceisballer » Wed, May 18, 2016, 1:16 PM UTC

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 computer at home and log in and have everything set up like I'm at work.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#3

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 18, 2016, 1:23 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#4

Post by jastanton » Wed, May 18, 2016, 1:25 PM UTC

I've done something similar for years, all my files are mounted on my drive with sshfs. Whether I'm at home or work everything is available to me and when I'm done I log off my VPN and all my sensitive documents unmount and "disappear", what's left is just a few applications... Sublime, chrome etc... Works great.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#5

Post by commandshift90 » Wed, May 18, 2016, 1:31 PM UTC

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 that with some work could be composed into a better stack than the 3P pieces and protocols they use currently.

I don't think I've disclosed anything here that isn't already public knowledge, past my own wild speculation based on zero knowledge of internal workings since my departure. If anyone has any questions that I can answer without endangering myself to NDA issues, I'd be glad to answer about Workspaces.

I think it's a great product for those who benefit from it; I ended up leaving the team because while the technological challenges were interesting, I couldn't put myself in any potential users' shoes, and therefore really couldn't drum up much organic passion of my own.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#6

Post by rboyd » Wed, May 18, 2016, 1:32 PM UTC

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

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#7

Post by matt_morgan » Wed, May 18, 2016, 1:34 PM UTC

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.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#8

Post by jareds » Wed, May 18, 2016, 1:35 PM UTC

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.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#9

Post by nickysielicki » Wed, May 18, 2016, 1:36 PM UTC

> 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 post an advertisement under the guise of a blog post.

Re: I love my Amazon Workspace

#10

Post by cm3 » Wed, May 18, 2016, 1:38 PM UTC

As long as your use cases are covered sufficiently and you're fine with cloud'ing your environment completely, I guess this can work.

But I much prefer being self-reliant and not at the whim of a company for things like my computing environment. This is why I run free/open source Unix variants and Linux and rely on applications whose config I can copy and reuse across machines. Add NixOS on top and you have yourself a one command setup on a new machine, if you desire so. If I don't own the environment myself and understand it, I cannot fix problems when they come up and they will, unfortunately.