Original article: Amazon WorkSpaces DaaS: Not a Lot of Desktop, Very Little Service.
Amazon has been tweaking its WorkSpaces offering, introducing a new “value-sized” virtual desktop and adjusting the standard virtual desktop specification, doubling the vCPU count to two and bumping memory from 3.75 to 4 GB.
| WorkSpaces Bundle | Hardware Resources | Monthly Price |
| Value | 1 vCPU, 2 GB memory, 10 GB user storage | $25 |
| Standard | 2 vCPU, 4 GB memory, 50 GB user storage | $35 |
| Performance | 2 vCPU, 7.5 GB memory, 100 GB user storage | $60 |
The 2 vCPU Standard package does appear significantly more competitive now and may gain some traction with enterprise customers willing to accept the platform’s current limitations. However, compared to this new Standard package, the Performance package appears overpriced and needs to come down to no more than $50 per month.
Amazon has also got its thin client house in order. Teradici has introduced a new virtual appliance that enables connections between PCoIP Zero Clients and Amazon WorkSpaces. The Teradici PCoIP Connection Manager for Amazon WorkSpaces is available from the AWS marketplace as an Amazon Machine Image running Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS. The connection manager supports up to 100 simultaneous logon attempts at once when a thin client is connected. All subsequent communications bypass the connection manager, so a single connection manager should be able to support many times this number. Further, if necessary, it is possible to load balance multiple connection managers.
Teradici is now listing forty-seven PCoIP Zero Clients from twenty-six manufacturers—including mainstream vendors Dell, HP, and 10ZiG—that will work with Amazon WorkSpaces. This is more than half the total number of PCoIP Zero Clients currently available.