AWS gives its cloud desktops a huge unexpected upgrade

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced two new versions of its Workspaces desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) cloud (opens in new tab) offering which come with surprisingly plenty of temporary local storage.

The two new workspaces are called Graphics.g4dn and GraphicsPro.g4dn. They add temporary local storage using “instance store”.

This a new AWS offering described by the company as an ideal for temporary storage of information that changes frequently, such as buffers, caches, scratch data, and other temporary content, or for data that is replicated across a fleet of instances, such as a load-balanced pool of web servers.”

Costs and availability

That being said, Graphics.g4dn comes with 100GB of instance storage, 4vCPUs, 16GB of RAM, and 16GB of video memory, which AWS claims is plenty for all the usual graphics-heavy applications.

The GraphicsPro.g4dn, on the other hand, comes with 6vCPUs, 64 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of video memory, designed for “media production, seismic visualization, GIS data processing, data intelligence, small-scale ML model training, and ML inference.”

Both work on second-gen Xeon Scalable CPUs (Cascade Lake), and on NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs.

As for the pricing, Graphics.g4dn will set you back $536 a month, while GraphicsPro.g4dn costs $959 a month. There are also monthly reservation fees and an hourly renting model, designed to cut down on expenses for specific use cases. 

Graphics.g4dn or GraphicsPro.g4dn bundles can be deployed with Windows 10 Desktop experience (powered by Windows Server 2019), but users can also bring their own Windows licenses, cutting down on costs a little more.

New graphics bundles can be launched by selecting their names in the Amazon WorkSpaces management console, the company added, as well as through the Amazon WorkSpaces APIs.

At the moment, they are available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo), and South America (São Paulo).

Via: The Register (opens in new tab)