Amazon to Deliver Virtual Desktops; Presenters Chastise the Private Cloud
The Amazon Web Services Reinvent conference is currently being held in Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference started on November 12th and runs until the 15th. One of the key speeches at the conference surrounded the release of the new Amazon virtual desktops which are aptly named, “Amazon Workspaces.”
Amazon Workspaces gives end users the ability to view a static desktop image anywhere in the world. Amazon Workspaces can be viewed on any device including traditional desktops, laptops, kindles, iPads and Android devices. There are currently 4 bundles available for users wanting to get started in the cloud. The lowest tier bundle starts at $35 per month and it includes basic applications such as a web browser, zip utilities, flash and Adobe Reader. The highest bundle, which is called Performance Plus, comes with 2 dedicated virtual CPUs, 7.5 GB of Memory, 100GB of storage and applications such as Office 2010 Professional, Trend Micro Anti-Virus and necessary utilities. The Performance Plus package costs $75. There are two additional packages in between these two that offer a variation of configurations.
At the Reinvent conference, the Senior Vice President of Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy made comments that essentially chastised the private cloud infrastructure. While some entities are legally required to have a private cloud, many companies still build out private cloud infrastructure when they don’t have to do so. Jassy equates this as the “Old Guard” of IT and his comments seem to construe that he thinks this is the old way of doing business. The new way of doing business would mimic the Amazon Workspace model where desktops are available in the public cloud with security measures that are instituted at the administrator level in order to keep company data safe. Jassy continued to tell the crowd of over 9,000 IT professionals, “We believe in the fullness of time, very few enterprises will run their own data centers.”
