12 ms·

> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month Why is it so popular? I can't understand the ec

> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? I know it's for businesses, but even then, does it come with tooling or something that makes management easier? What justifies an annual cost that is close to the lifetime cost of a physical machine? You still need a physical machine to access "the cloud", so don't you still have all the expensive problems related to managing a fleet of PCs, but now you have to do it x2? Is data security so important that some companies are willing to pay 5x hardware costs and 2x maintenance costs for it? I really don't get it. When I looked at the cost of using Azure for failover on a single server, the conclusion I came to is that it only made sense to run something short term while new hardware was shipped in. Who the heck is buying these VMs that cost 5x real hardware?

pwinnski 5y ago
Companies amortize capital expenditures, while monthly service costs are a separate line item (operating expenditures). I think there's also a perception that deploying and support physical hardware has higher labor cost associated. If it take one IT staffer per every X PCs, the presumption might be that X is higher when the "PCs" are virtual. But mainly, companies aren't doing what you're doing: looking at the five-year cost. They don't care what it costs over five years, or often even over one year. This quarter, the cost for that beast is $474. Can you deliver an 8-CPU PC with 32GB of RAM for $474? Today? Then the MS offering is better. Also, when you lay off an employee, you get to stop paying for their Windows license, instead of it being a sunk cost. There's definitely a reason they're targeting companies first. The economics make so much more sense in that world.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  > But mainly, companies aren't doing what you're doing: looking at the five-year cost. They don't care what it costs over five years, or often even over one year. This quarter, the cost for that beast is $474. Can you deliver an 8-CPU PC with 32GB of RAM for $474? Today? Then the MS offering is better. If you're willing to pay $10k over 5 years for a $2k PC, wouldn't there be a ton of financing companies willing to convert the capital expenditure to an operating expenditure for that? Where else can you make 80% annual returns on a capital investment?
  - pwinnski 5y ago
    Well, Microsoft is apparently willing to do that, for one. Which is what we're talking about here!
- temac 5y ago
  > The economics make so much more sense in that world. Actually the economics still does not make any sense in that world, but some people in some companies count things (only) using such rituals that they think it does. Which is, obviously, all that matters.
imwillofficial 5y ago
CapEx vs OpEx On the books this can be a boon for the bean counters.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Is data security so important that some companies are willing to pay 5x hardware costs and 2x maintenance costs for it? Yes. Also, maintaining a fleet of hardware is a resource suck. Being able to provision everyone with something like this lets them use their personal hardware without much compromised in the way of security. (It should also make onboarding much smoother.)
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  > lets them use their personal hardware without much compromised in the way of security How do they protect against an attacker compromising this client, waiting until the employee is asleep or away for a few minutes, then using the employee's session to compromise the remote machine? Even if session establishment requires 2FA, the attacker could keep the session alive after the user attempts to close it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - digitallyfree 5y ago
    For a targeted attack with a hacker remotely or physically controlling the client, I agree. However I think an automated attack would be difficult, especially if the VD sent its data to the client as a video stream, and only recieved keyboard and mouse inputs. Now maybe there's some fancy computer vision that could handle this (and all without the employee noticing)...
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
      You don't need computer vision to send Win+R, cmd<enter>, and whatever the Windows equivalent of "curl | bash" is. It's definitely going to keep a lot of the commodity malware out, but it's only going to stay secure until attackers start targeting it. And the risks from "inside" the machine (user downloads and runs something bad) don't go away, although the company gets a bit more control over the network (could also be done with an always-on VPN).
iso1210 5y ago
I work for a large corporation. I can spend 50k a month in AWS and it will barely register a flag. Try to buy a keyboard though and forget it.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  This does not surprise me; culture and processes in large corporations are usually entirely dysfunctional.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  I purchased a large desktop monitor and had it shipped to my contract company address delivery dock -- wow, you should have seen the number of alarmed accountant types I had to talk to .. but six-figure Ora licenses ? many in operation
  - NullPrefix 5y ago
    Did you print out the invoice to show for dramatic effect?
- 4r4r4r 5y ago
  We should band together and start laundering AWS resources for physical goods. Similar to how mining Bitcoin can lead to eventually obtaining physical goods.
- suresk 5y ago
  This sort of dynamic happens in smaller companies, too. And it isn't entirely on the company. I've been through similar sort of situations, for example consider some sort of SaaS service that costs $5k/year. I have to: - Fill out some form to get one of their salespeople to contact me. - Find a time to meet with them that works for both of us - may be a week or more out. - Talk to the salesperson for half an hour. - Get a quote emailed to me a day or two later. - Talk it over with my boss. This is fairly low overhead, but he's a busy guy so it may take a few days. He'll want to know the basics, if I've considered any alternatives, what we'll use it for, etc. - Sign the document - hopefully my boss/finance don't request any significant changes. - Start using the service once they get the contract and provision stuff for us. Usually we are looking at a few weeks lag time, and maybe half a day of my time taking care of all of this. If it is something available on AWS, here is what I have to do: - Click a button, maybe fill out a form to configure it. - Start using the service a few minutes later. Even if it costs 2x the other service, it is unlikely that anyone is going to notice or care about the small increase in our AWS bill, and if they do saying "oh yeah, I added xyz service" is not going to raise any objections. It is kind of funny to think about the difference, but it comes down to the fact that it is genuinely less friction in the AWS case, coupled with a bit of psychology on our end I guess.
Animats 5y ago
Who the heck is buying these VMs that cost 5x real hardware? Right. This has already been tried in the "game streaming" business. There have been multiple services where you rent a PC in "the cloud" by the hour, or for some number of hours per month. Either they cost too much, and fail for lack of customers, or they are underpriced as a loss leader, and get shut down after losing money. Google Stadia and NVidia Cloud Gaming are currently live, but Stadia is likely to join Google's list of discontinued products, and NVidia's offering involves being kicked off if you stay connected too long.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  selling dekstop pcs to businesses is totally different than selling gaming to consumers.
  - hogFeast 5y ago
    It isn't. Some of the companies that do the latter are also doing the former.
    - Closi 5y ago
      You are talking about Microsoft and Google - two of the largest computing companies on the planet. By the same logic, you could say that game streaming is like a search engine, because some of the companies that do the latter are also doing the former. The idea of provisioning remote cloud VMs is far older than Stadia or Xbox Cloud anyway.
      - hogFeast 5y ago
        I am not talking Microsoft or Google. There are lots of smaller companies that provide this service. Your point about game streaming being like a search engine is nonsensical.
        Closi 5y ago
        Exactly, just because two or more companies offer both game streaming and VMs doesn’t necessarily mean that those things are similar. They may be, or may not be, but your logic to say that they are similar isn’t right (otherwise other product lines must be similar by extension).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mnkypete 5y ago
You have an 8core laptop with 32gig RAM for $700? That's not super common though, I think usually you'd spend more like $2500-$3000k for it. Count in the reduced maintenance and hardware support + having your whole stuff in one place.. Might make sense if you are not super low on money
- betaby 5y ago
  You still have access that cloud Windows from ... laptop. So one have to pay for laptop + that cloud instance.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    The idea is probably that employees / contractors use their own hardware to access this. Someone likely already figured out how to fill out the Excel spreadsheets to make this secure.
- aksss 5y ago
  I think you can get the Dell XPS 13 , 32GB RAM, 11th gen i7 for about $2100 or sometimes less, but yeah. Definitely not seen these specs for $700.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  > You have an 8core laptop with 32gig RAM for $700? Like I said, it's used, so yes. I think the new cost is right in your $2500-$3000 range for a new version.
- pb82 5y ago
  Not quite 700$ but I recently bought a Laptop with a Ryzen 5700u (8 cores, 16 threads) and upgraded the RAM to 40Gb. Easily under 1000$ brand new.
  - MonaroVXR 5y ago
    So your RAM runs on Single channel mode. makingbl it's "speed" worse.
cptskippy 5y ago
When you use a lot of contractor developers, being able to provision out devices for temporary work is powerful. A lot of time is spent provisioning machines, white listing ips, setting up VPNs, and getting the contractor to the point where they can work. In some cases I've seen it take 2 or 3 weeks to get a contractor up and running on a 6 month contract. Being able to give them credentials to a machine that's ready to go is pretty huge.
- mongol 5y ago
  Yes the answer must be something like this. You can implement BYOD throughout the organization.
- betaby 5y ago
  I still didn't get how bare Windows VM can speed up a new developer on-boarding. In all my jobs slowest part was always familiarization with a new build/deploy environment. OS/Laptop setup was always trivial and took 1-2 day max, even in orgs with 20k employees.
  - ehutch79 5y ago
    "No one told us about a new hire... when do they start... what do you mean a week ago?" is a big delay in new employee onboarding
    - edoceo 5y ago
      That seems really far along the process to recognize the mistakes.
      - ehutch79 5y ago
        You'd think that?
    - ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
      “We don’t give admin right to install software” (except they do, you just need to ask the right person - there is always someone who will)
olyjohn 5y ago
I think the thing we are missing here is... What was the capacity to begin with? If they have capacity for 1000 machines... that's not particularly impressive, nor does it show that it's really popular. The fact that they're leaving the numbers out makes me think this is a hype piece to make everybody think it's more popular than it is... but I dunno.
notthedroids 5y ago
They are bundling the IaaS hardware with the price of the MS software stack subscription. You need to net out the cost of standalone windows and office from the monthly price. At the lower hardware tiers, it's a bigger percentage of the price. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/compare-all-microsoft-365-business-products https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/compa...
- anamexis 5y ago
  Where are you seeing that? Your link just goes to the Microsoft 365 (nee Office 365) pricing page. I couldn't find any mention of hardware on the Windows 365 pages.
jensensbutton 5y ago
This sounds a lot like, "why pay for <public cloud> when it's cheaper to provision your own hardware?"
- temac 5y ago
  Except how will people access such Windows 365 VMs usually?...
tw04 5y ago
You're assuming that a physical desktop or laptop is the alternative. Likely this is an alternative for people using vmware horizon or citrix for virtual desktops. In which case you'll be spending almost half that on just the software, not including any hardware at all. I'd need more info on the service, but I'd imagine this is very cost competitive. As to "why?" - because for things like HIPPA data, I'd MUCH rather have my doctors/IT staff logging into a remote desktop session that I can lock down so if their laptop gets stolen from their car I don't have to worry about whether or not some day someone will be able to crack drive level encryption. Or worry that an employee didn't have drive level encryption for some reason. Same for financial institutions/etc. Furthermore a doctor or insert staff can connect from home, and I don't have to worry about whether or not they properly secured their home desktop. Yes there is still some attack surface there, but far, far less than them storing files locally on their home PC.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  The VDI angle makes the most sense out of all the answers I've seen. However, I can't imagine anyone concerned about security would do BYOD for laptops or desktops. Every person I've ever seen using VDI has a company PC plus a virtual desktop, so there's no cost savings there. The main advantages I can see are easier backups and not having to worry about network bandwidth too much (just enough for RDP is good), but there are drawbacks too like dealing with remote printing, a lack of support for hardware security tokens, etc.. For example, try to get a YubiKey working [1] with WebAuthN or FIDO when using RDP / VDI. It's basically impossible and you're stuck with crappy 2FA like TOTP. 1. https://demo.yubico.com/webauthn-technical/registration https://demo.yubico.com/webauthn-technical/registration
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    Yubikey webauthn over RDP works just fine for me.
    - jb0x168 5y ago
      Is there an extension needed or is this a recent addition? I've spent way too long reconfiguring yubikeys to act as an OTP device so that they work over RDP. (edit: reconfiguration is needed to capture the device ID/secret and get them registered to our MFA provider as an OTP token, I realize they do OTP OOB :) )
reacharavindh 5y ago
I don’t need it, but I can understand why this gets traction. Enterprises can essentially give out a tightly controlled windows client to anybody that needs it, even if they are running a Mac. Severely restrict Windows without taking away liberties of the computer that the employee has. An employee can simply login to their Windows workspace and continue work regardless of their their thin client(s). Update windows without annoying your employee… Prevent employees from installing that random chat program that is almost definitely a spyware right alongside their work programs.. Oh and prep a golden image Windows workspace and onboard any employee within seconds.. I can see how this product makes its argument to enterprise IT.
- candiodari 5y ago
  But I don't get it. I've helped out with security at a bank, and one of our big problems was persistent and very advanced efforts by malicious actors to compromise endpoints. I've seen Trojans that would detect keypresses that look like bank accounts, take a screenshot and put it on top, replace the bank account number and then, seriously, detect with ocr on the confirmation page where the replaced account was and replace it there too. And these were made to steal amounts like 2k euro, maximum. I mean I guess that's still 2k euro * 1000 or so victims, but still (they do it this way because of 2FA, the customer must confirm on a second device, the little irritating calculators, the transaction) Everything depends critically on endpoint security. You cannot make this work securely. I mean a simple Trojan could simply fake a logout, then transmit the screen + keypress control to an attacker. And I would add: your enterprise security is not just dependent on a device you don't control, this also represents a "get out of jail free" card for malicious insiders. If they just make sure to have 4-5 viruses installed on their home machine, whatever they did in the company machine is excused ...
zanderz 5y ago
I worked at a company built on hardware products that was compelled to add some SaaS offerings because many large enterprise accounts have much simpler processes for subscriptions and AWS spend vs. capital expenditures. Sometimes a $500 machine is more expensive than $2,500 worth of services, it seems.
908B64B197 5y ago
> Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? CapEx vs OpEx. Also, your iPad is now a Windows machine with eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month.
- mdoms 5y ago
  > Also, your iPad is now a Windows machine Until Apple decides they're not comfortable with that and bans it.
  - NullPrefix 5y ago
    There are HTML5 VNC clients. Although I'm not sure if they work on Ipads
Rapzid 5y ago
After a recent Windows 10(Pro) update it tries to guide you through setting up a bunch of stuff and pretty much signs you up for the 365 trial. My guess is that's what happened.
jordache 5y ago
Perhaps business value the tax benefits of to moving computer hardware costs from capex to opex.
api 5y ago
Nearly all irrational pricing like this can be explained by corporate bureaucracy and dysfunction. If you need to provision someone you can buy them a laptop, but that's CapEx and has to go through some equipment purchasing bureaucracy that's hell on wheels to deal with. Cloud services are OpEx though and might be something you as an IT person or department head can just approve as long as the monthly cost is low enough. The cumulative cost difference over many months or years doesn't factor into it. A whole lot of the cloud trend can be explained this way. Of course other use cases include temporary employees, testing, external contractors, etc.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
>Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? My guess is that this kind of financial inanity is being driven by accounting rules: CapX vs OpX, revenue recognition rules, etc...
- sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  10k for five years isn't that bad when you factor in upgrade policy, support staff and scale it up to a company of 50-60k employees. just reducing some of the policy enforecemnet requirements with machines being virtual is probably worth the cost of two or three laptops no need to overthink VPNs with tricky clients vm's already on the right network/subnet/whatever, hell each machine can have nice software controller azure IAM roles it's a dream for cloud working
mushufasa 5y ago
Externally managed cloud provisioning can be a win from a SOC2 / ISO compliance perspective. You've just changed from having to manage controls on local environments yourself (e.g. antivirus, MDM, logging etc ) to offloading the risk to a third-party vendor. Now, you may think that is more INSECURE because now someone else has control over your environments, and that may be true for any arbitrary cloud desktop provider. But when it is Microsoft themselves, it will be hard for an auditor to take issue; they already manage the risk of the OS security itself.
samlevine 5y ago
> You still need a physical machine to access "the cloud", so don't you still have all the expensive problems related to managing a fleet of PCs, but now you have to do it x2? Microsoft Intune/Endpoint manager is actually pretty easy to setup/enroll laptops. Autopilot takes a bit of work, but it does get you to the point where IT doesn't have to do anything on a new laptop shipped to a user. Ultimately if you don't want your users doing much on their laptops you can make it pretty simple to manage them. > Is data security so important that some companies are willing to pay 5x hardware costs and 2x maintenance costs for it? It really depends on the industry. Most folks aren't doing this because security isn't a priority. Some firms may not survive a data breach, others might incur tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in costs (directly and indirectly) for one large breach. These folks do care and will spend whatever it takes because it's got a business justification.
znpy 5y ago
> Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? For the same reasons people pay for the was clouf offerings or the Google cloud equivalent. Less hassle, less stuff to manage, faster provisioning, hassle-free decommissioning.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"Who the heck is buying these Vms that cost 5x real hardware." Those with the ability to pay. The Microsoft sales force knows who they are and goes after them aggressively. There really isn't anyone like you in these targetted organisations who can question these decisions. Palms have been well-greased. Try to have an intelligent converstation with a Microsoft sales person. It is like you are talking to someone in a cult.
morpheuskafka 5y ago
And as far as security goes, the now unmanaged BYOD client can still have keyloggers or screen recording malware that can extract company data. If your users can't be trusted with any sort of onboarding/MDM enrollment, it would still be cheaper to just send them a working laptop. If you don't want to do VPNs, you could still do Zero Trust style applications and have a cloud MDM for management.
- c618b9b695c4 5y ago
  >...or screen recording malware that can extract company data. I have idly wondered how trivial it would be to exfiltrate data through HDMI. HDCP strippers exist and would let you record the output with perfect fidelity (1920x1080x3 is a lot of data). Simplistically, could compress data files, push through hexdump, paginate at chosen rate, and done.
unoti 5y ago
> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month > Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? It's probably not similar to the PC you're typing on in many ways, including the following: - Probably significantly higher bandwidth to the internet - Astonishingly high bandwidth to Azure resources (fiber) - Outstanding security: cameras, carefully controlled access, 24x7 physical security - Hardware reliability automatically serviced - Multiple sources of power (usually more than one power utility company connected, plus generators) - Multiple network connections typically, for redundancy - Backups managed for you - Can push a button and make a clone of your PC that your friend can log in to for a couple days then delete it when you're done - If someone wanted to steal your hard drive by breaking into your house, they totally could. But getting your cloud PC hard drive image is going to take more determination than breaking through a window. For many users, none of the above things matter. But for a lot of users, having all those things taken care of is a big win. Have you ever had a fan or a hard drive die on your pc? Or deal with the pain of migrating data off a dead PC onto its new replacement? Maybe that sort of thing happens only once every few years to you. But if you're managing, say, 25 pc's, every month you're going to be dealing with 1-3 problems in your fleet.
- TheNewAndy 5y ago
  You still need another device to connect to it right? The hardware reliability can only go down by adding more hardware to the system. Same goes for power, and to some extent network.
  - valzam 5y ago
    What you can do though is offer very generic, lightweight, long battery life laptops (chromebook maybe?) that are completely interchangeable. You could literally have a stack in every office building (like big companies have vending machines for power cords etc.) and if someone's laptop dies they just take another one, log in, done. You can also give everyone the same laptop and then configure the necessary hardware requirements virtually. I still think it's very expensive but I can see the appeal. Also don't forget: Companies love OPEX and hate CAPEX. Does it make sense from a pure sticker price perspective? Maybe not. But it could from an accounting and tax perspective.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I thought the service was free? I wouldn't wonder if a lot of windows machines started to mine bitcoin.

pwinnski 5y ago

Companies amortize capital expenditures, while monthly service costs are a separate line item (operating expenditures). I think there's also a perception that deploying and support physical hardware has higher labor cost associated. If it take one IT staffer per every X PCs, the presumption might be that X is higher when the "PCs" are virtual. But mainly, companies aren't doing what you're doing: looking at the five-year cost. They don't care what it costs over five years, or often even over one year. This quarter, the cost for that beast is $474. Can you deliver an 8-CPU PC with 32GB of RAM for $474? Today? Then the MS offering is better. Also, when you lay off an employee, you get to stop paying for their Windows license, instead of it being a sunk cost. There's definitely a reason they're targeting companies first. The economics make so much more sense in that world.

donmcronald 5y ago
> But mainly, companies aren't doing what you're doing: looking at the five-year cost. They don't care what it costs over five years, or often even over one year. This quarter, the cost for that beast is $474. Can you deliver an 8-CPU PC with 32GB of RAM for $474? Today? Then the MS offering is better. If you're willing to pay $10k over 5 years for a $2k PC, wouldn't there be a ton of financing companies willing to convert the capital expenditure to an operating expenditure for that? Where else can you make 80% annual returns on a capital investment?
- pwinnski 5y ago
  Well, Microsoft is apparently willing to do that, for one. Which is what we're talking about here!
temac 5y ago
> The economics make so much more sense in that world. Actually the economics still does not make any sense in that world, but some people in some companies count things (only) using such rituals that they think it does. Which is, obviously, all that matters.

imwillofficial 5y ago

CapEx vs OpEx On the books this can be a boon for the bean counters.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> Is data security so important that some companies are willing to pay 5x hardware costs and 2x maintenance costs for it? Yes. Also, maintaining a fleet of hardware is a resource suck. Being able to provision everyone with something like this lets them use their personal hardware without much compromised in the way of security. (It should also make onboarding much smoother.)

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> lets them use their personal hardware without much compromised in the way of security How do they protect against an attacker compromising this client, waiting until the employee is asleep or away for a few minutes, then using the employee's session to compromise the remote machine? Even if session establishment requires 2FA, the attacker could keep the session alive after the user attempts to close it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- digitallyfree 5y ago
  For a targeted attack with a hacker remotely or physically controlling the client, I agree. However I think an automated attack would be difficult, especially if the VD sent its data to the client as a video stream, and only recieved keyboard and mouse inputs. Now maybe there's some fancy computer vision that could handle this (and all without the employee noticing)...
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    You don't need computer vision to send Win+R, cmd<enter>, and whatever the Windows equivalent of "curl | bash" is. It's definitely going to keep a lot of the commodity malware out, but it's only going to stay secure until attackers start targeting it. And the risks from "inside" the machine (user downloads and runs something bad) don't go away, although the company gets a bit more control over the network (could also be done with an always-on VPN).

iso1210 5y ago

I work for a large corporation. I can spend 50k a month in AWS and it will barely register a flag. Try to buy a keyboard though and forget it.

hallway_monitor 5y ago
This does not surprise me; culture and processes in large corporations are usually entirely dysfunctional.
mistrial9 5y ago
I purchased a large desktop monitor and had it shipped to my contract company address delivery dock -- wow, you should have seen the number of alarmed accountant types I had to talk to .. but six-figure Ora licenses ? many in operation
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  Did you print out the invoice to show for dramatic effect?
4r4r4r 5y ago
We should band together and start laundering AWS resources for physical goods. Similar to how mining Bitcoin can lead to eventually obtaining physical goods.
suresk 5y ago
This sort of dynamic happens in smaller companies, too. And it isn't entirely on the company. I've been through similar sort of situations, for example consider some sort of SaaS service that costs $5k/year. I have to: - Fill out some form to get one of their salespeople to contact me. - Find a time to meet with them that works for both of us - may be a week or more out. - Talk to the salesperson for half an hour. - Get a quote emailed to me a day or two later. - Talk it over with my boss. This is fairly low overhead, but he's a busy guy so it may take a few days. He'll want to know the basics, if I've considered any alternatives, what we'll use it for, etc. - Sign the document - hopefully my boss/finance don't request any significant changes. - Start using the service once they get the contract and provision stuff for us. Usually we are looking at a few weeks lag time, and maybe half a day of my time taking care of all of this. If it is something available on AWS, here is what I have to do: - Click a button, maybe fill out a form to configure it. - Start using the service a few minutes later. Even if it costs 2x the other service, it is unlikely that anyone is going to notice or care about the small increase in our AWS bill, and if they do saying "oh yeah, I added xyz service" is not going to raise any objections. It is kind of funny to think about the difference, but it comes down to the fact that it is genuinely less friction in the AWS case, coupled with a bit of psychology on our end I guess.

Animats 5y ago

Who the heck is buying these VMs that cost 5x real hardware? Right. This has already been tried in the "game streaming" business. There have been multiple services where you rent a PC in "the cloud" by the hour, or for some number of hours per month. Either they cost too much, and fail for lack of customers, or they are underpriced as a loss leader, and get shut down after losing money. Google Stadia and NVidia Cloud Gaming are currently live, but Stadia is likely to join Google's list of discontinued products, and NVidia's offering involves being kicked off if you stay connected too long.

skeeter2020 5y ago
selling dekstop pcs to businesses is totally different than selling gaming to consumers.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  It isn't. Some of the companies that do the latter are also doing the former.
  - Closi 5y ago
    You are talking about Microsoft and Google - two of the largest computing companies on the planet. By the same logic, you could say that game streaming is like a search engine, because some of the companies that do the latter are also doing the former. The idea of provisioning remote cloud VMs is far older than Stadia or Xbox Cloud anyway.
    - hogFeast 5y ago
      I am not talking Microsoft or Google. There are lots of smaller companies that provide this service. Your point about game streaming being like a search engine is nonsensical.
      - Closi 5y ago
        Exactly, just because two or more companies offer both game streaming and VMs doesn’t necessarily mean that those things are similar. They may be, or may not be, but your logic to say that they are similar isn’t right (otherwise other product lines must be similar by extension).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mnkypete 5y ago

You have an 8core laptop with 32gig RAM for $700? That's not super common though, I think usually you'd spend more like $2500-$3000k for it. Count in the reduced maintenance and hardware support + having your whole stuff in one place.. Might make sense if you are not super low on money

betaby 5y ago
You still have access that cloud Windows from ... laptop. So one have to pay for laptop + that cloud instance.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  The idea is probably that employees / contractors use their own hardware to access this. Someone likely already figured out how to fill out the Excel spreadsheets to make this secure.
aksss 5y ago
I think you can get the Dell XPS 13 , 32GB RAM, 11th gen i7 for about $2100 or sometimes less, but yeah. Definitely not seen these specs for $700.
donmcronald 5y ago
> You have an 8core laptop with 32gig RAM for $700? Like I said, it's used, so yes. I think the new cost is right in your $2500-$3000 range for a new version.
pb82 5y ago
Not quite 700$ but I recently bought a Laptop with a Ryzen 5700u (8 cores, 16 threads) and upgraded the RAM to 40Gb. Easily under 1000$ brand new.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  So your RAM runs on Single channel mode. makingbl it's "speed" worse.

cptskippy 5y ago

When you use a lot of contractor developers, being able to provision out devices for temporary work is powerful. A lot of time is spent provisioning machines, white listing ips, setting up VPNs, and getting the contractor to the point where they can work. In some cases I've seen it take 2 or 3 weeks to get a contractor up and running on a 6 month contract. Being able to give them credentials to a machine that's ready to go is pretty huge.

mongol 5y ago
Yes the answer must be something like this. You can implement BYOD throughout the organization.
betaby 5y ago
I still didn't get how bare Windows VM can speed up a new developer on-boarding. In all my jobs slowest part was always familiarization with a new build/deploy environment. OS/Laptop setup was always trivial and took 1-2 day max, even in orgs with 20k employees.
- ehutch79 5y ago
  "No one told us about a new hire... when do they start... what do you mean a week ago?" is a big delay in new employee onboarding
  - edoceo 5y ago
    That seems really far along the process to recognize the mistakes.
    - ehutch79 5y ago
      You'd think that?
  - ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
    “We don’t give admin right to install software” (except they do, you just need to ask the right person - there is always someone who will)

olyjohn 5y ago

I think the thing we are missing here is... What was the capacity to begin with? If they have capacity for 1000 machines... that's not particularly impressive, nor does it show that it's really popular. The fact that they're leaving the numbers out makes me think this is a hype piece to make everybody think it's more popular than it is... but I dunno.

notthedroids 5y ago

They are bundling the IaaS hardware with the price of the MS software stack subscription. You need to net out the cost of standalone windows and office from the monthly price. At the lower hardware tiers, it's a bigger percentage of the price. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/compare-all-microsoft-365-business-products https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/compa...

anamexis 5y ago
Where are you seeing that? Your link just goes to the Microsoft 365 (nee Office 365) pricing page. I couldn't find any mention of hardware on the Windows 365 pages.

jensensbutton 5y ago

This sounds a lot like, "why pay for <public cloud> when it's cheaper to provision your own hardware?"

temac 5y ago
Except how will people access such Windows 365 VMs usually?...

tw04 5y ago

You're assuming that a physical desktop or laptop is the alternative. Likely this is an alternative for people using vmware horizon or citrix for virtual desktops. In which case you'll be spending almost half that on just the software, not including any hardware at all. I'd need more info on the service, but I'd imagine this is very cost competitive. As to "why?" - because for things like HIPPA data, I'd MUCH rather have my doctors/IT staff logging into a remote desktop session that I can lock down so if their laptop gets stolen from their car I don't have to worry about whether or not some day someone will be able to crack drive level encryption. Or worry that an employee didn't have drive level encryption for some reason. Same for financial institutions/etc. Furthermore a doctor or insert staff can connect from home, and I don't have to worry about whether or not they properly secured their home desktop. Yes there is still some attack surface there, but far, far less than them storing files locally on their home PC.

donmcronald 5y ago
The VDI angle makes the most sense out of all the answers I've seen. However, I can't imagine anyone concerned about security would do BYOD for laptops or desktops. Every person I've ever seen using VDI has a company PC plus a virtual desktop, so there's no cost savings there. The main advantages I can see are easier backups and not having to worry about network bandwidth too much (just enough for RDP is good), but there are drawbacks too like dealing with remote printing, a lack of support for hardware security tokens, etc.. For example, try to get a YubiKey working [1] with WebAuthN or FIDO when using RDP / VDI. It's basically impossible and you're stuck with crappy 2FA like TOTP. 1. https://demo.yubico.com/webauthn-technical/registration https://demo.yubico.com/webauthn-technical/registration
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  Yubikey webauthn over RDP works just fine for me.
  - jb0x168 5y ago
    Is there an extension needed or is this a recent addition? I've spent way too long reconfiguring yubikeys to act as an OTP device so that they work over RDP. (edit: reconfiguration is needed to capture the device ID/secret and get them registered to our MFA provider as an OTP token, I realize they do OTP OOB :) )

reacharavindh 5y ago

I don’t need it, but I can understand why this gets traction. Enterprises can essentially give out a tightly controlled windows client to anybody that needs it, even if they are running a Mac. Severely restrict Windows without taking away liberties of the computer that the employee has. An employee can simply login to their Windows workspace and continue work regardless of their their thin client(s). Update windows without annoying your employee… Prevent employees from installing that random chat program that is almost definitely a spyware right alongside their work programs.. Oh and prep a golden image Windows workspace and onboard any employee within seconds.. I can see how this product makes its argument to enterprise IT.

candiodari 5y ago
But I don't get it. I've helped out with security at a bank, and one of our big problems was persistent and very advanced efforts by malicious actors to compromise endpoints. I've seen Trojans that would detect keypresses that look like bank accounts, take a screenshot and put it on top, replace the bank account number and then, seriously, detect with ocr on the confirmation page where the replaced account was and replace it there too. And these were made to steal amounts like 2k euro, maximum. I mean I guess that's still 2k euro * 1000 or so victims, but still (they do it this way because of 2FA, the customer must confirm on a second device, the little irritating calculators, the transaction) Everything depends critically on endpoint security. You cannot make this work securely. I mean a simple Trojan could simply fake a logout, then transmit the screen + keypress control to an attacker. And I would add: your enterprise security is not just dependent on a device you don't control, this also represents a "get out of jail free" card for malicious insiders. If they just make sure to have 4-5 viruses installed on their home machine, whatever they did in the company machine is excused ...

zanderz 5y ago

I worked at a company built on hardware products that was compelled to add some SaaS offerings because many large enterprise accounts have much simpler processes for subscriptions and AWS spend vs. capital expenditures. Sometimes a $500 machine is more expensive than $2,500 worth of services, it seems.

908B64B197 5y ago

> Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? CapEx vs OpEx. Also, your iPad is now a Windows machine with eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month.

mdoms 5y ago
> Also, your iPad is now a Windows machine Until Apple decides they're not comfortable with that and bans it.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  There are HTML5 VNC clients. Although I'm not sure if they work on Ipads

Rapzid 5y ago

After a recent Windows 10(Pro) update it tries to guide you through setting up a bunch of stuff and pretty much signs you up for the 365 trial. My guess is that's what happened.

jordache 5y ago

Perhaps business value the tax benefits of to moving computer hardware costs from capex to opex.

api 5y ago

Nearly all irrational pricing like this can be explained by corporate bureaucracy and dysfunction. If you need to provision someone you can buy them a laptop, but that's CapEx and has to go through some equipment purchasing bureaucracy that's hell on wheels to deal with. Cloud services are OpEx though and might be something you as an IT person or department head can just approve as long as the monthly cost is low enough. The cumulative cost difference over many months or years doesn't factor into it. A whole lot of the cloud trend can be explained this way. Of course other use cases include temporary employees, testing, external contractors, etc.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

>Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? My guess is that this kind of financial inanity is being driven by accounting rules: CapX vs OpX, revenue recognition rules, etc...

sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
10k for five years isn't that bad when you factor in upgrade policy, support staff and scale it up to a company of 50-60k employees. just reducing some of the policy enforecemnet requirements with machines being virtual is probably worth the cost of two or three laptops no need to overthink VPNs with tricky clients vm's already on the right network/subnet/whatever, hell each machine can have nice software controller azure IAM roles it's a dream for cloud working

mushufasa 5y ago

Externally managed cloud provisioning can be a win from a SOC2 / ISO compliance perspective. You've just changed from having to manage controls on local environments yourself (e.g. antivirus, MDM, logging etc ) to offloading the risk to a third-party vendor. Now, you may think that is more INSECURE because now someone else has control over your environments, and that may be true for any arbitrary cloud desktop provider. But when it is Microsoft themselves, it will be hard for an auditor to take issue; they already manage the risk of the OS security itself.

samlevine 5y ago

> You still need a physical machine to access "the cloud", so don't you still have all the expensive problems related to managing a fleet of PCs, but now you have to do it x2? Microsoft Intune/Endpoint manager is actually pretty easy to setup/enroll laptops. Autopilot takes a bit of work, but it does get you to the point where IT doesn't have to do anything on a new laptop shipped to a user. Ultimately if you don't want your users doing much on their laptops you can make it pretty simple to manage them. > Is data security so important that some companies are willing to pay 5x hardware costs and 2x maintenance costs for it? It really depends on the industry. Most folks aren't doing this because security isn't a priority. Some firms may not survive a data breach, others might incur tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in costs (directly and indirectly) for one large breach. These folks do care and will spend whatever it takes because it's got a business justification.

znpy 5y ago

> Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? For the same reasons people pay for the was clouf offerings or the Google cloud equivalent. Less hassle, less stuff to manage, faster provisioning, hassle-free decommissioning.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"Who the heck is buying these Vms that cost 5x real hardware." Those with the ability to pay. The Microsoft sales force knows who they are and goes after them aggressively. There really isn't anyone like you in these targetted organisations who can question these decisions. Palms have been well-greased. Try to have an intelligent converstation with a Microsoft sales person. It is like you are talking to someone in a cult.

morpheuskafka 5y ago

And as far as security goes, the now unmanaged BYOD client can still have keyloggers or screen recording malware that can extract company data. If your users can't be trusted with any sort of onboarding/MDM enrollment, it would still be cheaper to just send them a working laptop. If you don't want to do VPNs, you could still do Zero Trust style applications and have a cloud MDM for management.

c618b9b695c4 5y ago
>...or screen recording malware that can extract company data. I have idly wondered how trivial it would be to exfiltrate data through HDMI. HDCP strippers exist and would let you record the output with perfect fidelity (1920x1080x3 is a lot of data). Simplistically, could compress data files, push through hexdump, paginate at chosen rate, and done.

unoti 5y ago

> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month > Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? It's probably not similar to the PC you're typing on in many ways, including the following: - Probably significantly higher bandwidth to the internet - Astonishingly high bandwidth to Azure resources (fiber) - Outstanding security: cameras, carefully controlled access, 24x7 physical security - Hardware reliability automatically serviced - Multiple sources of power (usually more than one power utility company connected, plus generators) - Multiple network connections typically, for redundancy - Backups managed for you - Can push a button and make a clone of your PC that your friend can log in to for a couple days then delete it when you're done - If someone wanted to steal your hard drive by breaking into your house, they totally could. But getting your cloud PC hard drive image is going to take more determination than breaking through a window. For many users, none of the above things matter. But for a lot of users, having all those things taken care of is a big win. Have you ever had a fan or a hard drive die on your pc? Or deal with the pain of migrating data off a dead PC onto its new replacement? Maybe that sort of thing happens only once every few years to you. But if you're managing, say, 25 pc's, every month you're going to be dealing with 1-3 problems in your fleet.

TheNewAndy 5y ago
You still need another device to connect to it right? The hardware reliability can only go down by adding more hardware to the system. Same goes for power, and to some extent network.
- valzam 5y ago
  What you can do though is offer very generic, lightweight, long battery life laptops (chromebook maybe?) that are completely interchangeable. You could literally have a stack in every office building (like big companies have vending machines for power cords etc.) and if someone's laptop dies they just take another one, log in, done. You can also give everyone the same laptop and then configure the necessary hardware requirements virtually. I still think it's very expensive but I can see the appeal. Also don't forget: Companies love OPEX and hate CAPEX. Does it make sense from a pure sticker price perspective? Maybe not. But it could from an accounting and tax perspective.

raxxorrax 5y ago

I thought the service was free? I wouldn't wonder if a lot of windows machines started to mine bitcoin.