Amazon's cloudy 'WorkSpace' desktops-as-a-service gain a GPU Amazon Web Services' (AWS') desktop-as-a-service “WorkSpaces” just grew up. And got all muscly, too: the cloud colossus has announced a new option to add 1,536 CUDA GPU cores with 4GB of graphics memory. The new “Graphics bundle” also offers eight virtual CPUs and 15GB of RAM, plus a 100GB virtual disk for users on top of the …
However, you would have to worry about hardware failures, power, patching, backup, etc.
You also would not get, by default, the availability of the machine at multiple locations (home, work, hotel, trade show, client's office).
Also, if you do not use it 8h/d, the cost comes down. Say you only need that power available one day per week, or for a couple of months for a specific project, the costs scale down appreciably.
I'm not saying these outweigh the cost, but there are some specific instances where these would be much more suitable than purchasing a workstation.
It's been a year or two since I ran the numbers for the behemoth I was working for at the time, but I recall figures ranging from GBP 500/yr for a locked down, managed desktop through to GBP 1500/yr for a let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom-and-pick-up-the-pieces-along-the-way lash-together.
There'll be a use case for AWS, just not one I'm that keen on at that price. A shame, because the concept is very appealing.
"Hmm. At 8hrs/day, 230-day working year, that's around $3K per year. You could buy a nice new workstation every year for that, and not have to worry about it getting DDoSed, or otherwise being unavailable."
Yes you probably could buy a new workstation for that, but not run it as well. My calculations are that my old workhorse at home (circa 2008 dual-quad code) consumes between £700-£800 of leccy P/A.
Don't forget the running costs of the local client machine.
You still need a box on the desk with screen(s) and power.
Yes it can be a much cheaper and lower-power machine, but the running and local support costs are not going to be much lower than for a beast of a machine.
That sort of remote-desktop really doesn't make sense to me.
Render farm, compile farm, yes, absolutely - far cheaper to rent by the hour than to fill a cupboard full of hardware.
I wouldn't imagine the usecase would be fore a complete computing replacement more that as a user who occasionally requires access to a more powerful machine. They can use their cheap whatever machine (tablet/phone with doc, laptop or desktop pick as desired) for 90% of their workload then move over to the powerful machine when they need to do the powerful thing. Of course you need to monitor it carefully to see that you don't hit a tipping point where a dedicated local machine is a better idea.
Remote graphics certainly works fine in 4K / PCoIP hardware remote display with solutions like AmuletHotkey and LAN / WAN connections
How it works with software based rendering and an internet connection is probably rather less great and presumably somewhat more resource intensive...
We use a remote desktop working-from-home arrangement at my $dayjob.
Performance at home varies according to the whims of the internets and probably also load on the VPN gateway. Some days its absolutely fine - not noticeably different to being in teh office ... others its frustratingly horrible.
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