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- 4vCPU / 16GB / 80GB SSD -> 70USD Converting to my local prices / currency it would take two years before the costs add up to an equivalent physical laptop. T

by pid-1 4y ago

- 4vCPU / 16GB / 80GB SSD -> 70USD Converting to my local prices / currency it would take two years before the costs add up to an equivalent physical laptop. That's the same price of a few laptop renting services I've prospected this year. Unfortunately I don't think cloud desktops will make sense for me folks until thin clients get cheaper.

jm4 4y ago
Having used virtual desktops (self-hosted in colo) in an enterprise environment before, I don't think individuals are the target market for this. It was a great way to enable remote work from any device while still controlling our data and keeping it within our network. Not to mention, we had a wide variety of users and needs and it was a way to deliver high performance without breaking the bank because we could pool hardware resources. Network performance was insane because everything was in the same cage and hooked up to 40 gig switches. It was just display protocol going over WAN connections, and as long as you had relatively low latency the performance was good. DR/BC planning also became much easier. Support, maintenance, deployment, desktop refreshes, governance, etc. We were spending about $300 per thin client and would run them through multiple desktop refreshes until they died. Then pull a replacement out of inventory and the user is back up and running in a few minutes. All the typical stuff you have to deal with in an enterprise environment was just much less of a headache and lower cost overall with the virtual desktops. So up front, we spent more per desktop, but we made up for it pretty much everywhere else. And we were able to move faster than any other setup I've seen and we did it with a relatively small team. I could think of a few use cases where these Ubuntu desktops would work well. Data science teams, anything involving big data, development teams working on heavy applications with a lot of moving parts that won't scale down to a laptop dev/test environment very well.

by pid-1 4y ago

jm4 4y ago

Having used virtual desktops (self-hosted in colo) in an enterprise environment before, I don't think individuals are the target market for this. It was a great way to enable remote work from any device while still controlling our data and keeping it within our network. Not to mention, we had a wide variety of users and needs and it was a way to deliver high performance without breaking the bank because we could pool hardware resources. Network performance was insane because everything was in the same cage and hooked up to 40 gig switches. It was just display protocol going over WAN connections, and as long as you had relatively low latency the performance was good. DR/BC planning also became much easier. Support, maintenance, deployment, desktop refreshes, governance, etc. We were spending about $300 per thin client and would run them through multiple desktop refreshes until they died. Then pull a replacement out of inventory and the user is back up and running in a few minutes. All the typical stuff you have to deal with in an enterprise environment was just much less of a headache and lower cost overall with the virtual desktops. So up front, we spent more per desktop, but we made up for it pretty much everywhere else. And we were able to move faster than any other setup I've seen and we did it with a relatively small team. I could think of a few use cases where these Ubuntu desktops would work well. Data science teams, anything involving big data, development teams working on heavy applications with a lot of moving parts that won't scale down to a laptop dev/test environment very well.