Amazon WorkSpaces: Your PC Now Lives in the Cloud

Amazon gave us another sneak peek into the future this morning when they announced the release of Amazon WorkSpaces during the AWS re:Invent conference keynote speech.

AmazonWorkspaces is a workstation-as-a-service offering where you can provision a cloud-hosted "desktop" to use in all of your day-to-day tasks. You can access your desktop instance form any device, which means you will be able to start a session on, say, your laptop and move to a tablet or another machine later and pick up right where you left off.

The best part of Amazon WorkSpaces is that all of your data now lives in the cloud, instead of your local machine. This will allow companies to feel better about letting devices walk out of the door each day along with their employees.

I'm also intrigued about the possibility of doing my more intensive computing and development on-demand. Instead, it would be much nicer to carry around a lightweight machine to use for typical day-to-day tasks and remote into my WorkSpaces VM when I need to do some heavy-lifting. Not having to lug around a massive developer laptop is very appealing to me.

If you're interested in learning more, sign up for a limited preview. Hopefully, Amazon will be able to deliver an excellent remote experience to the point where you don't even realize you are computing on a device that is thousands of miles away.