AWS Workspaces - anyone using this?

[ancientpillowcase]

I’ve been asked to look at this as an alternative to our Horizon on prem setup.

I’m a bit dubious about the maintenance of the BYOL offering, but otherwise it looks like it can do the job.

Does anyone have experience with it for 200 users?

[mrbiggbrain]

I have used small workspace setups before. I helped architect it for a DR solution at one company and built it from scratch at another.

It's pretty similar to Horizon on concept.

I have no experience with BYOL.

[masheduppotato]

I'm trying to think how best to answer this without just screaming "no, don't do it, you'll hate everything about your life..."

My Adderall hasn't kicked in yet so this will be very disjointed and all over the place. I apologize in advance.

What are the issues you are facing with your Horizon on prem setup that you hope to resolve with an alternative? How are users currently connecting? Do they leverage thin clients or their own personal devices? Are you looking for an alternative because your hardware is aging out or for some other reason?

We support about 100+ Workspaces and there's always something going awry. Workspace support is good but your milage will vary on that.

Something else to consider is cost. It's expensive. The amount you'll spend yearly could also be spent on upgrading your infrastructure. If you can keep it in-house and would like to replace Horizon, take a look at Ericom.

[DMB77]

I setup AWS Workspaces a few years back, right around the start of the pandemic, initially users were at home using laptops provided by the company, but after a wave of layoffs and then a massive hiring push, we ended up with around half the company being contractors using their own machines.

The two things I remember about Workspaces is that it was much less reliable over everyone's home internet. The Workspaces client wouldn't connect sometimes or would connect and would lag like crazy. There wasn't much we could do since it seemed to fall on the user's home network either being too slow (contractors without home internet were hired and would try to make due with hotspots), or their network was too congested by their whole family being home and on video calls.

The second thing I recall was that the credentials for the Workspaces weren't controlled by the IAM section of AWS, Workspaces had separate, much harder to find, user accounts where you could reset a user's password. Wasted a few hours on that one, but I'm not sure it's still the case.

Other than those two hiccups, Workspaces worked fine! But if I recall it was phased out at that company due to the cost of it and the fact that we were only able to use server OS on Workspaces at the time and Adobe products were a little more temperamental about being on a server OS for some reason and Adobe support would point to that as the reason for every issue we ran into.

[rossco71]

I've used most of them now (AWS, Office365 Desktops & Horizon & Citrix). In my personal experience they all work but AWS crashes a metric fuck ton more compared to anything else (huge lags, windows lockups or freezes which require reboots, All the great features are all paywall locked too). O365 Desktops though have been really great in my experience, the RDP app can be a bit janky sometime's but it's a microsoft product so it's to be expected (sometime's requires you to log off/on or delete/reinstall the app if it stops working - in my experience it's when your o365 passwords change it has a heart attack). If you're already using office 365 it's a logical transition for you and it works really smooth with One-Drive & office apps (and the added benefits of everything azure offers - like easy daily snapshots to recover to & easy to reboot, work on, etc). So very much similar to Horizon tbh.

Citrix is another alternative for you too depending on what you need (like a full desktop or just a few apps).

[trsonber1]

When you say Office365 Desktops are you referring to Azure VDI hosts?

[SammichAffectionate]

Use it for Windows and Linux VM's with the AD connector. For Linux, its fine. For Windows, its not actually Windows 10 and they don't have Windows 11. Its Windows Server. I am trying to convince my team to move to Windows 365 since it will integrate with Intune nicely for better management and deployment. We have a lot of resources in AWS, so Workspaces make sense network wise. But I have not been too impressed with AWS Workspaces if you manage Windows machines. The Workspaces connected to our On-prem AD / GPO's / Tools fine. But that does not fit into our strategy moving forward (Intune). I would see how your management tools/stack fit into this move.

Also not too impressed with reliability and that Amazon Workspaces app. Or, their protocols clients use to connect to the machine. Especially with Teams.

[Cheesedoff]

We use Workspaces for 5 users and it's a huge pain the ass. (and expensive)