[ylem]

In science, it's common to run one week schools on various topics for graduate students and young postdocs. When software is involved, we spend a lot of time dealing with the students' installation issues. I tried the VM approach once, but the images are relatively large and when I tried it with VMWare, the registration process was still a bit cumbersome. This time I tried Amazon workspaces for about 30 students. Though I had some initial growing pains (be careful on permissions!) and they did (I think they were just scaling up when we ran it), I would use it again. It simplifies the Mac/PC issues that we had and makes it easy to share materials. We did have one student with a linux box and it's a shame that Amazon didn't (doesn't?) have a windows client, but overall I had a positive experience. I saw that someone mentioned that there is an Azure option that's similar? At the time, I saw that VMware also had an offering. Has anyone tried it?

*disclaimer these are my personal opinions, not my employer's