Amazon Workspaces – Usage Notes

Pros:

• Reasonably Priced
• Easy to setup
• Easy to add other users
• Easy to reset to zero and retain data
• Expensive plan has good response

Cons:

• No usage based pricing
• Requires usage of the Amazon Workspaces Client
• Can’t save password, makes complex passwords a pain
• Can’t move to different workspace easily
• Cheap plan not really fast enough for me.

Summary:

I think the standard plan would be great for most people. Reasonably priced if you need office or not. I think using the MS Office 365 would be a better deal for most, but it’s certainly nice to get turnkey with no work on office and anti-virus. I’m surprised MS doesn’t offer something like this yet really. I wish there was a save password option for the client to make use of complex passwords easier, but this could be solved by a password reset policy I suppose.

My Profile:

My computer time is split between Communication and Content Creation about 70/30. Communication is via the usual Email, Chat, and Screen Sharing. Most content creation is in MS Office or some type of coding application. The most important thing for me when utilizing a VDI platform is that it is fairly responsive when I’m working in multiple applications and need to alt-tab back and forth. VDI doesn’t exactly shine in this capacity when you are working remotely, but I feel like I can get a good sense of a worst case scenario for typical users when I am testing.

Verdict:

Good, but I am not going to replace my standard solution for this (local use of Parallels on my MBPro), yet.

Pricing, Setup, Experience, Recovery, Performance