BOOM – what an announcement from Amazon today:
This is a real game changer for me. There is a lot going on and Amazon is now absolutely in the Desktop as a service market. Amazon offers 4 bundles:
- Standard – 1 vCPU, 3.75 GiB of memory, and 50 GB of persistent user storage – $35 / user / month.
- Standard Plus – 1 vCPU, 3.75 GiB of memory, and 50 GB of persistent user storage – $50 / user / month.
- Performance – 2 vCPU, 7.5 GiB of memory, and 100 GB of persistent user storage – $60 / user / month.
- Performance Plus – 2 vCPU, 7.5 GiB of memory, and 100 GB of persistent user storage – $70 / user / month.
A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is created as part of the setup process. The VPC can be connected to an on-premises network using a secure VPN connection to allow access to an existing Active Directory and other intranet resources. WorkSpaces run on Amazon EC2 instances hosted within the VPC.
Communication between EC2 and the client is managed by the PCoIP (PC-over-IP) protocol. The client connection must allow TCP and UDP connections on port 4172, along with TCP connections on port 443.
Persistent storage is backed up to Amazon S3 on a regular and frequent basis.
Amazon blog announcement and TCO comparison can be found here:
The bold statement here:
Total Cost of Ownership of 1000 users using a desktop computing service such as Amazon WorkSpaces can be less than half the cost of running and managing an equivalent VDI solution on an on-premises infrastructure.
It is only one month ago since VMware acquired the DaaS pioneer Desktone. So there is a lot of market offering and consolidation going on this year.
What I don’t understand is the licensing issue with Microsoft about Office and Windows. I would really love to hear more about the agreement between those parties. Even with the rumors about Microsoft is going to enter the DaaS market with project Mohoro, todays announcement indicates more to come:
So these moves really put high pressure at Citrix and XenDesktop. Not even mentioned DaaS provider tuCloud at least. I believe there will be much more eruption in the DaaS market coming and 2014 might be the “hype” year of DaaS.
Exciting times. What do you think?
Patrick Sauerwein | @virtual_patrick 
Well I love the news of DaaS entering the limelight of cloud computing. With all the confusion about true Dektops-as-a-Service vs Managed VDI or even on-premise VDI I think it was just a matter of time for AWS entering the market and setting records straight.
As you said there are several technology providers out there already offering this kind of service based on own technology. tuCloud and Desktone in the US, tocario in Germany and Europe and nivio in UK and India.
These companies still will have a point in the market, but all the MSPs out there just offering managed Citirx or VMware will really struggle to keep up with Amazon’s pricing and offering. As the TCO analysis of Amazon shows the costs of using out of the shelf technology is just to high to be comparable to optimized cloud technologies.
With Amazon entering the market the whole Desktop-as-a-Service market will probably gain some speed and we will see the alternatives to the managed Citrix Xendesktop or VMware View providers gaining more traction.
So even for us, being a niche competitor to the the AWS offering, we are looking forward to the market, that will develop!
Carsten – CEO tocario.com
Thanks Carsten, I mentioned you in my latest post: https://virtualpatrick.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/my-top-7-it-trends-for-2014-from-an-end-user-computing-view/
Let me know your thoughts.
All the best,
Patrick