Amazon Web Services announced Wednesday that it is entering the desktop virtualization market and will offer Amazon WorkSpaces — Windows-based desktops — from its cloud servers. Amazon Workspaces were introduced during a keynote talk by Andy Jassy, senior VP, at Re:Invent, AWS’ annual event for around 9,000 developers, partners, and customers in Las Vegas.
The desktop move comes at the expense of VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, who have gone unchallenged until now in their slow progress to virtualize desktops. Virtualization thus far has been primarily a data center phenomenon, consolidating applications on servers and reducing the total physical server count. But for all the speed with which it’s swept through the data center, the movement has stopped at the data center’s walls. Meanwhile, the problem of virtualizing desktops has become more dicey as end users adopted Apple iPads and iPhones, then Android phones and other mobile devices.
Amazon thus has a fresh chance to address the challenge on two fronts. Through its well-established practice of distributing compute cycles off automated, multi-tenant cloud servers, it may be able to challenge the virtualization vendors on cost. At the same time, it will make use of a flexible display protocol that can reach numerous types of devices.