In November last year, Amazon announced its Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution WorkSpaces. WorkSpaces offers a fully managed Windows 7 experience running on top of Windows Server 2008. At that time the service was offered in a Limited Preview.
Today Amazon announced the general availability of its WorkSpaces solution, which can be accessed using a PC or Mac or by using one of the WorkSpaces mobile clients available for iPad, Kindle Fire HDX and Android Tablets. With this release Amazon also releases the Amazon WorkSpaces Sync client, which automatically backups ups the documents created to Amazon S3.
Users can be authenticated in several ways:
- Extend your Active Directory domain by extending it using a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- Have WorkSpaces service provision and manage a directory within an existing VPC
- Create a new VPC and launch a Cloud Directory in it.
There are currently four WorkSpace bundles, with 1 or 2 virtual CPUs (vCPUs), 3.75 or 7.5 GiB of RAM, and 50 or 100 GB of storage. Prices range from $35 to $75 per WorkSpace per month. Amazon WorkSpaces is now available in the US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon) Regions.
For more information about what to expect, please read this 4 article review on the 4sysops website, written by Michael Pietroforte.