AWS WorkSpaces – The Amazon VDI answer
Amazon today announced at AWS re:Invent 2013, the second annual global event held in Las Vegas, Nevada between November 12th and 15th.
AWS WorkSpace
a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solution that is totally outsourced and with the classic onDemand model.
In short, after a lot of “noise” and a lot of marketing by the undisputed leaders of VDI (Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp, XenClient and vmware view) to make customers digest their “private” licensed solutions, with sometimes prohibitive costs if we also consider the infrastructure necessary to provide VDI solutions, now Amazon launches its strategy and also tries to respond in terms of TCO comparison, As you can read in this link : http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/11/tco-comparison-amazon-workspaces-and-traditional-virtual-desktop-infrastructure-vdi.html
The solution for now is in limited preview, the prices of the current combinations are as usual public, as we are used to in a real Cloud.
Let’s enjoy the official presentation video:
AWS AppStream
But that’s not all, there’s more to it than that, and it’s probably an even more powerful novelty than the WorkSpace. Amazon AppStream is a flexible, low-latency service that enables you to stream intensive applications, such as games from the cloud. The application is deployed and rendered on the AWS infrastructure and is streamed to low-power consumer devices.
Here, too, it is very reminiscent of the well-known Citrix HDX (High Definition Experience), which, however, as we said above, is linked to “private” solutions with a licensed model. While here we have the Public Cloud onDemand model with a very interesting pricing and an SDK to be able to develop our Apps to be distributed in streaming, that is, a sort of PaaS application virtualization.
This service is also in limited preview, for now.
Conclusions
It must be said that the idea of online streaming gaming is not new, since 2009 a company called OnLive which we have already talked about in the past, offers online games through consoles and later in 2012 the company exploits the installed computational power to offer streaming of desktops with all the necessary software products, Here the model is a freemium with noteworthy offerings .
In short, in the end, the difference will not only be determined by the price, but above all by the usability of these solutions, i.e. acceleration protocols and offline syncronization management solutions.
