Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

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.

[0]- http://www.citrix.com/products/xendesktop/overview.html

This could be especially useful for health professionals accessing big enterprise systems like Epic.

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.

It's supposedly possible.

http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/#hipaa

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).

Epic (hyperspace) is generally accessed through Citrix. It just runs in a single application container instead of exposing a full desktop.

Citrix seemed to have been a partner to Amazon: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/global-solution-providers/ci...

Not sure if Workspaces has any sort of collaboration with Citrix.

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.

This is going to be big for Chromebooks, I suspect.

And IT departments that don't want company data to ever exist on the laptops. We're back to dumb terminals and mainframes.

Except this time the mainframe is "The Cloud", and there are graphics, so fast internet connectivity is going to be even more essential.

"The Cloud" is still a mainframe in Virginia.

Mainframes?

Dumb Terminals are great for working environments and we should have never left them.

yes but it took some time to build a series of tubes to your home.

Progress is a circle.

I always liked the phrase "virtuous cycle" as well.

This made me laugh - ".. or to meet IT requirements to not have company data on end user devices"

Ya, just put it on Amazon's servers instead. That's way better.

Isn't it? Amazon's server team is way better than your company's.

I don't usually wave the flag, but no, they aren't. They might be comparable, but not better.

It is better. You can be HIPAA and other obnoxious-acronym compliant in an amazon VPC. You can't with data on random laptops...

> You can't with data on random laptops...

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.

3rd party cloud systems don't get stolen out of backpacks and left behind in coffeeshops.

I've got a free year of credit monitoring because a hospital laptop was stolen with patient data on it and they have no idea where it went. Yippee.

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'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.

I think there is a market there. VMware and Google have already announced a partnership on VMware's DaaS and Chromebooks - http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2014/02/vmware-to-bring...

VMware's DaaS has been available since earlier this month - http://www.vmware.com/products/daas

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.

So having given this a try. To setup a user with a machine is trivial. You enter their name, email address and what type of machine to give them.

Then an email is sent to them with all instructions and a validation code.

They do not need to have an AWS account.

And, it can tie into a firm's existing directory of users: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/adminguide/conn...

We have a use-case down at the office.

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.

Which is why Amazon AWS is available in Europe.

Which is _great_ because we're going after the EU market in a little bit.

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