DaaS - 2021 : confusing

raddevus

I started searching for Desktop as a Service (DaaS) options. I figured since it was 2021 there'd be a lot of companies that allow me to: 1) spin up a win10 desktop 2) RDP to the desktop and do my work. I've been using DigitalOcean which is a complete Linux (Debian) OS running as a service for about 8 years now (only $4.99 a month) so I figured, "Hey, this is 2021 and I'm sure there's something like this for win10 desktop." With DigitalOcean you can get one of these up and running following their wizard in about 5 minutes. It's amazing. Boy was a I wrong about DaaS. Very few choices (Amazon Workspaces seems to be the best / cheapest). Many of them require at least 5 seats (most require 25 or more). Others are $150 month for 1cpu & 4GB ram. Many of these won't even tell you pricing: just request quote option. Yes, I am very naive. Questions Do you have any experience with DaaS? What have you found? Was thinking about how I might help small businesses move to RDP solutions. The Dream: If you could spin up DaaS and then give people Google Docs then a lot of Small Businesses would have everything they need. EDIT I've also used MacinCloud - Rent a Mac in the Cloud! - Mac in Cloud[^] and was amazed at how great it worked. But Win10 / PCs -- you just don't find something this simple, it seems.

Slacker007

raddevus wrote:

If you could spin up DaaS and then give people Google Docs

Why do you need a "Daas" to give employees Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc.? Google Workspace (Formerly G Suite): Pricing Plans[^]

Richard Andrew x64

I think he's pointing out that with DaaS, you don't need to install and support a bunch of desktops. EDIT: And he's not saying that you need DaaS to have Google Docs, he's just saying "do these two things, and you're in business."

The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.

Jorgen Andersson

Didn't they use to call it thin clients? Why do I keep getting the feeling history is repeating itself.

Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello

Sander Rossel

With thin clients you connected to a VM on an on-premise server. With DaaS you connect to a VM on a cloud server and you call it DaaS. As you can see they're completely different things :D

Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript

realJSOP

I suppose we're doing DaaS. Our dev environments are on the cloud. We RDP to a "jump box", and then RDP from there to our "dev box". I gotta admit that the performance is usually pretty good. I don't know what it costs, but I expect that it's "a lot" because we all have 16gb RAM and 500GB hard drive space.

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

Slacker007

I'm just glad I work for a company that can afford laptops for all developers. I'm glad I work for a company that doesn't use DaaS. I'm glad I work for a company that doesn't use thin clients. I'm glad I work for a company that doesn't make me jump through 14 different magical portals just to get to my dev "box".

dandy72

If I'm reading your requirements right, this is one of those fundamental things Azure has been doing for years. Create a new Win10 VM, wait less than 5 minutes, and it's up. Pricing varies based on hardware configuration.

Kirk 10389821

You mean MVS (multiple virtual systems) running on Big Iron? Or do you mean Page Mode Terminals that send back all the fields of data for a specific

much like an HTML Form does? [after the client terminal "interprets" the escaped text to determine how to display the page, and where to put the fields] Or the slew of new languages to make things easier to program? [Requiring ever more complex compilers] Or maybe a DB without SQL? Really fast lookups. Like the Dimensioned File Arrays of the Old PDP-11s. [Literally indexing a file as an array because it cannot fit into memory, but the "block" of data can. Lightning fast, so effectively using a hash, jumping to a file position and reading]. I think the ONLY new things are how we are applying these layers, and the speed at which things change!