I've scratched my head on what exactly the use-case for this is. I'm going to need a computer of some sort to access my remote anyways. So what's the point?
Then I remember the remote freelance job my wife had for a while. They mailed her the employment paperwork, she filled it out, once they processed it they sent her a remote desktop URL, username and password and voila she was "at work". A day or two later she had everything she needed installed by the IT staff and off she went. She never actually went into the office, even once, and never met any of the employees there face-to-face. When she completed her contract they simply nuked the account she was using and reclaimed the licenses. They didn't ship her a laptop to work from and she didn't have to ship it back. If she had ever needed to go into the office, they could have let her use an aging extra machine with Remote Desktop to get back to work. Not a single piece of the company's "property" ever needed to come in contact with my wife's home computer and if she was waiting for her work computer to do something she could just minimize the RDP client and do something else.
I have no idea what they would have been paying for the Terminal server on their end, I've heard it runs north of $100k/year, and this service seems to be competing with that.
It's the Citrix killer.[0] I suspect the price is way lower than what Citrix charges and goes into a fairly untapped market of "non-biz" folk that might have use cases for it.
It wouldn't be. This is powered by Teradici's PCoIP solution (I worked on that) which is the competition to the Citrix HDX protocol. Teradici used to partner primarily with VMware and compete with Citrix in VDI.
Assuming all the HIPPA concerns are addressed. Last I checked, healthcare businesses want nothing to do with AWS, and either run their own infrastructure or begrudgingly use things like Firehost.
Yep, it's possible, but to get them to sign a BAA with you, you need to agree to only use a very small subset of the AWS products (basically just EC2 and S3. No RDS, no ELB, etc.). Additionally, any EC2 instance you provision need to have the "single tenancy" bit set on your instances. Which, when set, you start getting hit with a very high flat per-day "single tenancy" fee in addition to higher hourly costs for your instances.
Correct! Once you need single tenancy, you might as well be buying your own gear and colo'ing it (unless you have a desperate need for low latency access to other AWS services you simply can't move away from).
It's all about the tradeoffs given the constraints. Both dumb terminals and smart PCs have their advantages and disadvantages.
When a single system is cheaper (counting total ROI) than distributed systems, the mainframe approach will win. Otherwise, the distributed approach will win. The tradeoffs change from year to year and even company to company.
PS -- internal web apps are essentially dumb terminals as well, and businesses have been making those since the late 90s.
Well, yes you can, you just document the procedure.
I really can't understand the disconnect between setting a policy that you can't have company data on company owned/controlled desktops but can have all that data sitting in a 3rd party system.
And in the future you'll be able to get another free year because AWS was breached and all your health data has been accessible over the internet for god knows how long. Or maybe you won't because it wasn't the hospitals fault, it was Amazon's and you're not their customer. I know I'm looking forward to it.
But whatever, just hope that Amazon does the right thing, it's not like you or your healthcare provider can check up on it.
It very well could be if the experience does not seem laggy. I've been using a Windows VM from Azure whenever I want to do something that my Chromebook can't do. I get to the VM with Chrome remote desktop in a new window and it works pretty well.
Some of what we do is processing legal files. This involves managing 'our' ftp site, provided by the vendor.
Turns out this is a 'windows' server, connected via iscsi, to a directory where their FTP server dumps the files. This is, judging by the hostname, a vmware host.
I suspect an AWS workspace would be a lot cheaper to run than a VMWare cluster.
I think the primary use case is not for personal use but for large corporations. The high availability (which we've also seen in aws) and pay-as-you-go pricing are probably the biggest selling points.
I hope other providers will follow suit. Amazon's offers are great but outside the US, using Amazon services becomes more and more of a legal problem due to privacy concerns.
Then I remember the remote freelance job my wife had for a while. They mailed her the employment paperwork, she filled it out, once they processed it they sent her a remote desktop URL, username and password and voila she was "at work". A day or two later she had everything she needed installed by the IT staff and off she went. She never actually went into the office, even once, and never met any of the employees there face-to-face. When she completed her contract they simply nuked the account she was using and reclaimed the licenses. They didn't ship her a laptop to work from and she didn't have to ship it back. If she had ever needed to go into the office, they could have let her use an aging extra machine with Remote Desktop to get back to work. Not a single piece of the company's "property" ever needed to come in contact with my wife's home computer and if she was waiting for her work computer to do something she could just minimize the RDP client and do something else.
I have no idea what they would have been paying for the Terminal server on their end, I've heard it runs north of $100k/year, and this service seems to be competing with that.