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What I do is the VDI approach. I have one AWS Windows instance with and I RDP to it from any of my computers at home, the office or any of my second homes, whic
by antaviana 9y ago
What I do is the VDI approach. I have one AWS Windows instance with and I RDP to it from any of my computers at home, the office or any of my second homes, which happen to be iMacs but could be anything.
- swah 9y agoI'd love to do something like this but I'm 150ms away from cheap VPSes.. Do you even watch Youtube (say) inside the instance??
- antaviana 9y agoIf I do not have fiber or my ISP is having a bad day, using my phone G4 as a personal Hotspot I get some 80 ms. I use USB instead of wifi to save 5ms. To save some money, I shutdown the AWS instance when I do not need it because it starts up in seconds. For web browsing I often use the local browser because with Macs swiching the current desktop is just a key stroke away (which is not the case for W10 if one of those desktops is the RDP client.
- ajsalminen 9y agoHow's the latency for text editing? I tried doing something like this with *nix tools but found it unbearable even when connecting to localhost.
- antaviana 9y agoIn my case it is indistinguisable from local text editing. I remember however that I chose to turn off SublimeText scrolling animations because it was a way worse than locally. My fiber latency to my AWS instance is about 60ms and with phone 4G about 80ms.
- monkmartinez 9y agoWhat does that run you per month? What are you doing on it compute wise?
- antaviana 9y agoI do not have exact costs at hand because it is just one of several AWS instances we have, but probably my fully loaded costs on a 160 hour month for this instance would be something like: - 150GB SSD: $15 - 150GB 30 last days of daily snapshshots as a backup: $3.45 - 160 hours of t2.medium (4GB) Windows: $8.64 The typical applications I use are Visual Studio, Delphi, Office, Chrome, and some domain specific apps. Admittedly, you can reduce further the SSD cost of $15 to 160/744*$15=$3.22, by snapshotting and deleting the SSD volume each time you shut down but I never did that optimization because startup time would then not be seconds but something probably in the range of 5 minutes, as you need to have some lambda funciton create a new instance, create a volume from the last snapshot, shutdown the newly created instance, replace the boot volume and finally start the instance with the right boot volume. What I also like of this approach is that I do not have to overprovision disk or instances, if I ever need a larger drive, I just modify the volume, if I need a bigger instance, I just shutdown and start with a bigger instance size.