AWS launches turbocharged cloud virtual desktop

Amazon Web Services has launched a new cloud virtual desktop offering that provides users with a turbocharged machine they can access over the internet. The WorkSpaces Power bundle offers users four virtual CPUs, a whopping 16GiB of RAM (1GiB is roughly 1.074GB), and 275GB of total storage.

The bundle is meant for developers, data analysts, and other people who want compute- and memory-heavy lifting to get their work done. As you might expect, the bundle commands a premium price.

Users will have to pay $78 per month for a Power bundle WorkSpace running in AWS’ US-East region in Northern Virginia. That’s $43 more per month than a Standard bundle, which offers 2 virtual CPUs, 4GiB of memory, and 130GB of total storage. (Customers can also choose to pay $19 per month and 68 cents an hour for a Power bundle, if they don’t expect to use the WorkSpace very frequently.)

It’s part of the company’s continued expansion of WorkSpaces, a popular product that enables companies to hook employees up with virtual Windows machines that only exist in an AWS data center. The new Power bundle means that cheap, slow machines can behave like high-powered laptops that cost much more — provided they have a high-speed connection to AWS’s cloud.

One of the other key benefits to these machines is that they have low latency access to data stored with AWS. For example, it’s possible to use a WorkSpace to do quick analysis on large amounts of data stored in the AWS Simple Storage Service, since a machine running in an Amazon data center can access that information much more quickly.