[kfullert]

OK, so Workspaces appeals to me (C# developer for a small company, no IT team, working from home) as redundancy - at present, if my laptop goes bang everything is backed up in "the cloud" (be that Azure, S3, somewhere) but it's the time getting everything restored like the multiple Visual Studio versions I need, the connectors for SSRS report designer etc. that I can see Workspaces working out for me (laptop goes bang, borrow my wifes one, connect to Workspace, carry on as if nothing happened until I can get a replacement)

However ... Workspaces looks like it needs an Enterprise AWS subscription ($15k/month?) so what alternatives are there for someone like me, where someone takes care of providing a Virtual Desktop, making sure it's running, backed up, connectable from anywhere (obviously with me responsible for ensuring off-site backup of any code/deliverables as I am at the moment) or is it best just to run up my own VPS with Win2k12 or similar and use that?

EDIT Ignore that, I was getting a weird redirect where trying to subscribe to WorkSpaces was taking me to the Support Subscription page, and just would not let me subscribe to WorkSpaces, but it appears to have sorted itself out now

[btown]

Where are you seeing the Enterprise AWS subscription requirement? Looks like pricing is per-user and rather reasonable: https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/

The $15k seems to be for enterprise-level support, which wouldn't be needed for trying out the service (you'd probably want a high level of support if downtime in the service literally prevents your entire office from doing work, of course).

[ianhawes]

Not sure where you saw that you need an Enterprise AWS subscription. I didn't.

I tried Workspaces for a month and it was decent. There are a few things it does better than RDP (especially on OS X). I did, however, switch to running Windows Server 2012 R2 on Azure instead, though that was because it was effectively free thanks to BizSpark.

[kfullert]

Ah, I was getting a loop saying "You need to subscribe to Workspaces" which would then take me to choosing a subscription which after selecting the Basic (free) one would take me back to saying "You need to subscribe to Workspaces" but it _appears_ to be fixed now :)

[btown]

Any noticeable latency differences between RDP to Azure and AWS Workspaces? I've noticed that the modern.ie free instances, for example, do have a noticeable amount of lag.

[ianhawes]

I have almost no latency issues with RDP in Azure. I can watch a YouTube video with no major latency. Workspaces wasn't terrible in that regard but definitely not as smooth.

The Azure machine is a bit beefier than Workspaces, so that probably factors into it.

[lallysingh]

Huh? You can run it separately and afaict, install whatever you want on it. A co-worker of mine ran workspaces for a while for $20-30 a month.

You could also just run everything on a VM locally and back up snapshots of the VM.

[witty_username]

You could copy your disk to an external drive and boot from that, or you could copy the files from the external drive into the laptop's drive.

[dav-id]

On Azure I believe your MSDN entitlements carry over so you could create a VM on Azure and keep it offline until you need it.