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
NVIDIA Virtual PC (vPC)
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
NVIDIA Virtual PC software & NVIDIA GPUs, including NVIDIA A16, accelerate productivity apps to deliver an incredible user experience — so today’s worker can seamlessly access the tools they need from anywhere.
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.
Nvidia GRID is the only real ready-made hardware solution available for streaming game services, 3D graphics acceleration in Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, and 3D enhanced streaming apps. Grid is also great for processing large quantities of small data-sets, such as financial, trading, science, astronomy, and much more. Grid is also well known for digital currency mining, such as Bitcoin.
The cost for Nvidia GRID capable hardware is still very high, but is & has been dropping fairly rapidly.
Latency is a large problem for "interaction" based systems (Gaming, remote desktop use) and requires high-speed data, and hosting close to the client.
No real solutions for smaller businesses, but cloud hosting providers like SoftLayer are beginning to offer affordable hosted grid-capable environments.
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.
Allows us to simplify all of our VDI designs, as power users can be managed like all other cloud users, instead of requiring individual systems.
Provides a way of offering a substantial processing increase for computing/calculations over and above what additional CPUs could offers.
Offers the only "ready-made" solution for on-demand gaming services, after Sony purchased OnLive, and provides an affordable method for startups to enter the Industry.
