Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed, secure cloud desktop service. Amazon WorkSpaces removes the complexity in managing hardware inventory, OS versions and patches, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).
$21
per month
Azure Virtual Desktop
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Azure Virtual Desktops are a comprehensive desktop and app virtualization service running in the cloud.
For our use case, we found Amazon WorkSpaces well suited to remote work and other "work from home" and "work on the road" situations where the end user did not need to consume HD media (notably 4K) and did not need to produce any multimedia (audio, video, etc), but rather needed to perform more typical tasks such as web-browsing our corporate intranet and internal online apps, accessing files and using them through office productivity suites (Office - both online and desktop, and LibreOffice are under testing), etc.
You can publish as many host pools as you need to accommodate your diverse workloads
Brings your own image for production workloads or test from the Azure Gallery
Reduces costs with pooled, multi-session resources.
With the new Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session capability exclusive to Windows Virtual Desktop and Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) role on Windows Server, you can greatly reduce the number of virtual machines and operating system (OS) overhead while still providing the same resources to your users.
For its Primary purpose in our organization, providing developers and testers a clean, isolated and configurable environments which saves hours. The usability is nearly perfect. Usability is only suffering when user is into more intensive task like any kind of graphic works. At that time user is not experiencing the smoothness like a local machine
AWS support in general is pretty good, and WorkSpaces is no exception. We haven't had too much need for support but on the occasion we have, they've been quick to respond and helpful. Our issues have been resolved rapidly.
WorkSpaces (VDI) is a much more robust solution that competitor offerings when considering scalability and security. Amazon WorkSpaces has a substantial free tier to explore if this is the right solution for your project without purchasing other solutions. Considering this, AWS is a great solution to explore Virtual Desktop experiences and workstations for any growing remote business.
For us Parallels RAS is still more a "onpremise" solution, with Azure Virtual Desktop we can really leverage the power of the cloud. We can spin up additional hosts if the load is too high and spin down hosts in the night to cut costs. Not being bound to onpremise hardware makes this extremely flexible. Seeing as most of our customers already have a M365 license that includes Azure Virtual Desktop licensing it doesn't cost us additional CAL's for Parallels RAS
