Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

I was pretty excited to give this a try because it might be a good fit for some frustrations I've had with running a GPU-dependent task on my laptop without discrete graphics.

Onboarding experience is terrible. Registered for an account from the Workstream page linked here, and was taken to a console with absolutely no mention of Workstream. Went back and forth a few times trying to figure out if auth provider had redirected to the wrong page after registration only. Ultimately searched through comments here to find out that Workstream is a variant of the CORE product. Having figured that out, went to the Core product, was rejected on creating an instance due to no payment on file. Not a huge issue, but would have been nice if I was prompted up front to complete this. Once I'm past that hurdle, I go back to the CORE product and find out that I'm not allowed to create GPU instances until I put in a ticket.

I'm hoping that this was some accident where this landing page ended up on HN when it wasn't supposed to be public knowledge yet, otherwise the lack of thought on just the setup process here is pretty concerning. I'm also pretty confused at the requirement that I put in a ticket to have GPU instances enabled when they've already taken payment info, and it seems like a test auth would be a better anti-fraud measure than the half-sentence I typed in.

Man, my excitement here sure was short lived.

Edit: got an email that I had been enabled. went to look. Three of the GPU types still show as locked but one no longer shows the lock icon, so I guess approvals are per-type? But I can't select the "unlocked" GPU type, it's disabled. There's no explanation of why. A couple of minutes of trying different combinations and I find out that it's due to the DC, if I choose a different DC I can select it. So I guess they're only available in one DC, at least right now? It would have been nice to be told that.

Edit: got the machine to provision, installed the client from another HN comment. I logged into Paperspace using a Google account. The client does not list this as an option. Only email, github, AD, and SAML. I give up. Except for the machine is still provisioning and I have paid $10 for storage. Great.

I've used Paperspace's Gradient product (hosted Jupyter notebooks), and while it is cheaper than most other options, I can't recommend it. The service has a very janky feel. When I first started, there was an issue where my instance was was stuck "shutting down" for half an hour or more and I couldn't access my code. Then there was a weird issue where some kind of geographical split between different types of instances resulted in my code getting lost (I think it happened twice). It has the feel of a product held together by duct tape and chewing gum with a thin veneer of slick graphic design. I recently tried using their CORE product (GPU heavy VMs), but for some reason instances with GPU's are not enabled until you write them a message (I did, and they haven't responded in a week).

My advice would be to use the cheap, high performance machines (VC subsidized?) if it makes sense, but never ever store data with them without backing up to a different service (git or Dropbox maybe?)

Was going to try their Free account, until I signed up and the discovered the big black "Free" had a tiny light grey "+ Machine Utilization Charges" beneath it. Everything is "Free + Charges".

I'm just going to state again what I want, which is only tangentially related to the topic...

1) I go on Github and configure a service

2) I make a wallet that people can donate to

3) I start up a virtual machine, aimed at the Github, using the wallet to pay for the time on the machine. The virtual machine host guarantees that the code at that Github is what's really running.

I can imagine lots of other things I want, too, but this is the bare minimum. I think it'd be really useful in a lot of scenarios.

I think there is a market here. I don't use this service, but instead use an EC2 instance as my developer box (for personal projects) and I do like being able to easily move between multiple machines, no matter where I am and easily spin up another instance when I want to start fresh or try out other setups like having a more powerful machine or something with a GPU. At work (I work at AWS) most people do the same for their developer machines and don't have physical desktops, just using their laptops for access or lightweight local development.

A service that makes setting up and managing those developer machines easier for folks who don't want to learn or fiddle with AWS options would be valuable.

Lots of red flags. These guys apparently have very little clue what they're talking about.

I mean "fast + virtual" already makes me doubtful. And I'm sure that with the internet being overloaded by everyone working from home, using remote desktop is going to be even more painful than usual.

But when they claim "Get a new computer in less than 5 minutes, zero configuration required." and then mention 3ds max, I am 100% convinced that they are clueless. Pretty much nobody uses the stock 3ds renderer, so you'll need to install something like Redshift or V-Ray, too. And setting up the plugin licensing alone will take you hours. Plus you have to re-do it every time the underlying hardware of your virtual instance changes.

Oh, and then there's pricing. "P6000 For extreme 3D apps, rendering" starts at 50GB SSD? WTF? I have a 8TB storage raid here to keep the scene files around. And then "Only pay for what you use" but "For hourly plans, if your machine is powered off, you will only be billed for your storage."

OK, so you pretend to cater to 3D professionals, but you fail to mention licensing, the number 1 cloud issue, you provide too little storage to load even a hobby-sized rendering project, and your on-demand service will bill me for storage unless I download and re-upload terabytes of data every time I switch projects.

I'd say you can greatly improve your pitch by NOT promoting it as a professional solution. It's probably great for hobbyists and gamers, so I would focus on them with the marketing.

Oh and how are you going to be "Delivering every frame in less than 16.6 ms" when there's 50ms of latency (due to speed of light) between me and your closest server?

I used paper space for remote gaming via Parsec. I also purchased one of their machines for remote development purposes. While I was waiting for parts to fix my laptop.

The service was really good. The machine was fast, with RDP it felt close to local. They also offered very powerful hard ware.

I moved on because it was a bit pricey at that point. This was about a year, year and a half ago. I think it was about 50 a month for me. I moved onto a dedicated server that I used KVM and LibVirt to manage.

That worked but it's obviously a lot of over head.

Better known as 'Desktop Virtualization'. Established competitors in this space are Citrix/XenDesktop, Microsoft/HyperV, Oracle/VirtualBox, VMware/HorizonView used in combination with remote desktop clients like X11 and Remote Desktop Connect. Is there an angle here that is new and interesting?

Curious what folks think the outlook on this technology is. Rather, will there be any significant shift towards centralized compute in the next decade?

Currently, a large institution/corporation has to manage thousands of individual machines. Say a physical component fails, now a technician must go to the location of the machine and give the user a temporary replacement. Alternatively, in a centralized compute environment, they could just allocate a new machine, and work entirely out of a data center.

And what about software updates and upgrades?

In the centralized model, both software updates and hardware upgrades can be managed more easily. Sure, we have good software tools to update all networked devices, but if that fails, the admin still sometimes needs physical access.

One market I see this potentially taking off in is academia and hospitals. (Though I’m biased because I’m employed by a Medical School)

Much of the record keeping is already done with a centralized infrastructure. Liberal use of active directory and low powered clients is the norm.

And particularly for research, there’s the added benefit of being able to allocate more resources without any physical action. Say I’m trying to run a script to fold proteins on my lab workstation. Usually, I’d be limited to the hardware on hand, but in the centralized model I could request or allocate a more powerful machine. Sure, the current solution is to spin up your own VM and move your program. Often, academic institutions have their own on-prem compute for this purpose. However, both still require technical ability on part of the user.

How close are we really to the model of giving all users a dummy client (think Chromebook) and centralizing The real compute? What challenges, disadvantages am I missing?

This looks like a consumer targeted product. If so, they should use a "per month" pricing instead of the per hour pricing which only caters to nerds who will go through the trouble to calculate.

I hope it's actually an affordable option overall compared to any other options out there.

Anybody used it for gaming? I was a beta user of the Nvidia service which is dedicated to gaming and while overall acceptable, lag spikes would render the use of the platform really frustrating. Everything would be smooth for 30s and then "lag" or freeze for up to 1-2s and then resume. Fine if playing the sims, but when you are in a fight in fast paced games it's a deal breaker. To my knowledge, so far, no platform has figured out the proper streaming/input lag management to make the experience truly seamless. Is this one different?

"How does pricing work? For hourly plans you are charged a flat rate(depending on machine type) per month to cover storage and access.

Am I charged when my machine is off? For hourly plans, if your machine is powered off, you will only be billed for your storage."

Are those charges listed anywhere? They don't seem to be on the Workstream pricing page.

So I read through the whole landing page and I don’t really understand what this is. It sounds like it’s just another virtual private server? How is this different from getting a VPS on any hosting provider and remote desktoping into it? I guess since it’s paid by the hour rather than pay by month, but generally a service like this charges you for every hour your virtual machine exists, not just when it’s running. So unless you want all your data deleted you’re going to be paying longer-term anyway. Or maybe that’s not the case, they certainly don’t go into any detail to explain it one way or the other.

First, that is a pretty nice web site. The notion of this sort of virtual computer goes back a ways, the one thing I keep expecting to see but haven't yet is a fully encrypted experience where the "cloud" bits don't work unless the user's local display has a security token attached.

My first experience with type of architecture was in the 80's with something called an "X terminal". All the same elements, a machine with a display / keyboard /mouse that had a network protocol to talk to some hardware acting on my behalf in a machine room. I could sit down at any station and open up my desktop, just as I had left it. It is a pretty decent experience even with only a 10mbit Ethernet network.

The second time I got to experience this architecture was in the Citrix days (late 90's early 2000's) Now the OS was always Windows and the network protocol was proprietary, but you could bring up an entire enterprise without all that pesky installing/rebooting that was the life of an early Window's system administrator. Also gave you control over employees trying to put bogus software on the computer. No Netscape Communicator for you! Work work work. :-)

Somewhere after Citrix imploded with all the problems that come with a walled garden with razor wire on the walls, we started seeing deployments using virtual machines and VNC. That gave you the "what you see is what is happening" feel of Citrix but now you had a different choice of operating systems and better vendor flexibility. VNC over a SSH SOCKS proxy replaced X11 over SSH as a more "universal" way of implementing this architectural design pattern.

Of course Google gave us "the browser is the computer" with ChromeOS and now the machine as a browser target where the browser is something more standard.

I like the architecture but in the previous iterations there was always some big problem it was addressing, X terminals addressed mobility, Citrix addressed enterprise configuration management, VNC/VM addressed multiple OSes other than Windows while retaining enterprise configuration management, and ChromeOS went for a better security model, mode-less configuration, and minimal cost of entry.

What problem does Workstream address either better or differently than what the above solutions address/addressed?

Looks quite interesting. I could really use a Windows box that I could use for a few games while I'm isolated not at home with only my Macbook Pro.

It doesn't look like this is launched yet, at least I don't see it when I log in. I've been happy with their notebook product Gradient though, and it will be interesting to see if latency is good enough for this to replace some local desktop usage.

What I wonder, is there a special cloud service for compilation? Compilation is a spike in IO and CPU and most of the time nothing (and I don't mean a build server, but an exported file system I can edit on my computer and compile very fast in the cloud).

I've been using Paperspace Air machine since they first launched (still paying early bird prices too) and their basic Windows VM is pretty amazing.

I'm mostly a Linux/Mac guy, but I spend a few hundred hours per year logged into my Paperspace machine and almost always have it doing something for me.

It's perfect for getting access to your own toolchain on any computer. And it's got plenty of resource to give it time-consuming jobs to do. It has just enough GPU to give it an edge over some of my cheap VPS options.

It was perfect when I was contracted out to a highly restrictive corporation and couldn't access my own employer's tools due to firewall policy. The browser-based remote desktop always worked.

I'm curious what others here are paying for a cloud VM for dev tasks. My current favorite VM size on Azure is Standard_NC6_Promo that includes a K80 GPU, 56GB RAM with 8 vCPUs for $0.39/hour.

Does it support snapshotting a machine after you configure it and install all your custom software then create a new machine from the snapshot?

Not a heavy user, but I've been using Paperspace a few times for gaming. They make it really easy. They have a "template" you spawn a new instance from, or use a blank windows install. Their template is handy since it has Steam and Parsec already installed.

What they seem to be doing here is saying you don't need Parsec and can just use their browser implementation instead.

Sounds great!

Any chance for more zones for paperspace? Wanted to use them for a cloud gaming host, but they don't have any regions in Los Angeles

I use Paperspace's core compute machines for my IDE and dev machines. It's great not having to run everything local, can use a cheap low end laptop locally but still have a beast dev machine. If I end up hosing my dev I can just start it from the last snapshot.

Granted could probably do this with any host/cloud infrastructure. But I'm happy with it.

As a computer-savvy dev, i feel like its hard to beat building your own given how cheap & powerful desktops are today, and how good software is.

Workstream specs are - 6 CPU, 16GB RAM, 2GB graphics card, 256GB SSD.

You could build a desktop beating that for around $800 today - including a Ryzen 3600, motherboard, case, better GPU etc. At $0.18/hr for Workstream, that means after just 44 hours you breakeven on building your own machine.

With a little extra work on setting up VNC/RDP/Parsec you can then access this desktop from anywhere. I already do this and it works great for the most part. The streaming app/protocol is key, and thanks to teams like Parsec and Moonlight we have high quality software doing this for free.

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But given their target market, this does look really cool. Amazon Workspaces costs 3x-4x more for comparable machines with Windows. Paperspace looks like its offering OSX and some good bundled software for designers, VFX etc.

This is a new world to me... I'm looking to learn a GPU intensive application like Davinci Resolve before committing to a new machine to run it locally -- would this be an appropriate solution, and would it obviate the need for the local machine, i.e. can I do everything on this that I could do locally?

Would something like paperspace be a good platform for software development? My slow computer doesn't handle IntelliJ that well. Instead of buying a new PC I could rent this for a few hours at a time.

> How does pricing work?

> For hourly plans you are charged a flat rate(depending on machine type) per month to cover storage and access. Additionally, you are charged an hourly rate when the machine is running. Monthly plans are offered at a flat rate for unlimited access.

Then the pricing page doesn't list the flat rate, when looking at hourly pricing - but does show an hourly price for monthly billing? Possibly monthly/(30 * 24)?

Ed: looks like hourly for monthly plan is calculated as monthly/(365÷12×24)

I really like the idea of Paperspace and I've tried to get going a few times on the free plan but I hate notebooks. I didn't fully understand the server + gpu offerings, which is what I want. I would love it if I could just get an IP to scp some scripts to, then ssh in and run them. I don't think it's possible to get billed only for GPU time when you're running it this way though, so it would be pricey to keep the server up.

Hi. Developer and part-time computer science high school teacher here. Does Workstream support graphical desktop linux machines, or only terminal? Thanks!

Vagon[1] is another interesting solution tackling to solve a similar problem.

1. https://www.vagon.io

I use Paperspace for running Fusion360 which is a CAD application. I use a Linux laptop and there are no really good CAD applications in Linux space(I tried FreeCAD but Fusion 360 is so much easier to use though). Works like a charm and extremely light on the wallet(I bill roughly 15 ~ 20 USD per month with around 40 to 60 hours of usage). It's been a godsend so far.

I'm curious about something because I'm working on a side project that's "in the area".

How does workstream, or indeed any remote computing provider, handle the possibility of people using their service to attack other computers, or to store/transfer extremely illegal data? They're not exactly running KYC identification.

Can somebody highlight the difference between this new "workstream" product, and their regular "core" VMs?

This actually seems like a game changer. Access to machine learning / developer rigs at incredibly cheap prices?

Do Workstream VMs come pre-installed with the pro software they mention in the blurb? If so, this sounds compelling.

Is there something like this that's self-hosted?

My ideal scenario is something like this that's $20/month for unlimited usage, with the caveat that you have to have the server in your own house with your own internet, but the service is that it provisions your machine and proxies it for fast speeds everywhere.

I have to recommend https://shadow.tech! It is a Windows VM intended specifically for (but not limited to) gaming! And it works extremely well, I am playing games on it for ~ 2 years by using their client app on Linux.

Signed up for a paper space account about a year and a half ago, they had a dark UI pattern to stop people from deleting their VMs, and it kept charging me every month with no method to stop it. After a month or too, they changed their UI to allow deleting the VM.

Another interesting solution for this is : https://shop.shadow.tech/usen/pre-order . They are currently expanding to some countries including the US.

I created an account to try some gaming (I'm on a Mac), but they require writing a message to access any GPU enabled machines.

Is https://www.paperspace.com/gaming deprecated?

I've used perforce in the past both for work & gaming. Gotta say, awesome experience!

Are there services like these that also “rent” the software (aside from the OS) licenses to you? I wouldn’t mind paying a pro-rated license for sharing photo or video editing software for example.

I think the pricing section has a few mistakes under Monthly

$1343 / hour

$1.84 effective hourly price

This is a really great idea!

I wish you a lot of luck in this endeavor!

Any plans for a free, ultra-lightweight tier of service? You might be able to get more paid subscribers over time that way...

What is the min mbps upload speed required for success here?

this works out to ~$375/yr for their advanced plan if you figure 8 hr work days and 261 working days per year (https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+work+days+per+year). How does this compare vs an equivalent instance with some kind of remote desktop running on a cloud service?

Can someone clarify something for me please?

Is this (and others like it) just a new Citrix-type system? Or is this actually something new that changes the game?

Whats not clear is do I still pay for it when i'm not using it, but can restore processes and provisioned apps when I need to get back on?

Are there solutions that don't care about user location? Getting "not available in your country" from Shadow and Nvidia Now.

How is this different from virtual windows or Linux machine. You can run software remotely this way without having to buy a new computer

With all those websites preventing you to use tor, you can use tor to connect to this, and this to connect to whatever you need.

While interesting, it would’ve been great if they had a simple test no signup instance to evaluate responsiveness.

I've looked around the site but im still confused - It looks like its a windows OS? Is there an iPad client?

Is this a look at our future? Everybody will just connect to a more powerful computer in the cloud?

What about software licensing? Today I need Office, tomorrow I might need 3DStudio.

There's no cloud it's literally someone else's computer

No RTX/Turing GPUs?

My first thought was "Hey - I can try out Minecraft RTX!"

It is nothing other than being a fat client that works in the browser.

For people who have used it: is credit card the only payment option?

I’m relishing the switch back to the thin client / main frame model, but I want to own my main frame. Even if it physically sits in a company’s data center. With 5G we are getting closer to disposable glass thin client interfaces.

I only see Gradient and Core. Where is Workstream? Neat idea!

this looks awesome. I wish i could rent machines preloaded with the applications i use. but i guess the incentives for the licensers aren't aligned there.

What's the AWS equivalent to their biggest instance?

Is there a service like this for Linux desktop users?

Back to the future.

Maybe some benchmarks?

Anything?

laughs in tmux

I already have a fast computer

Why do you need to use a Virtual Computer when you already have a laptop/desktop you use to connect to this Virtual Computer? What am I missing? Is it only for folks connecting from Chromebooks?