Amazon WorkSpaces, announced in November 2013 and only accessible to a small group of selected users, is now available to the public. The AWS customers can purchase a subscription at a price between 35 and 75 dollars a month to create and manage a virtual desktop to the cloud. The Seattle company has also released the Amazon Sync WorkSpaces client for PC and Mac to be used for backing up files.

As with other Amazon cloud services, customers will be eligible for various options. Starting at $35 a month, AWS users can get a single virtual CPU with 3.75 GB of memory and 50GB of storage. A next installment of $50 per month includes more options and access to Office Professional 2011 and Microsoft Security Tool preloaded, although Amazon will allow its customers to install their own software if they wish.

Instead of spending large sums to implement a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) that allows employees to access corporate data using different devices, enterprise IT administrators can configure the desktop cloud accessible via client for PC, Mac, iOS, Android OS and Kindle Fire. Amazon WorkSpaces offers several options depending on the number of virtual CPUs, memory, storage and pre-installed applications. For all solutions, the operating system used by Amazon is Windows 7. To use the service user need an AWS account, a supported device, and Internet connectivity.

The Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution also supports Active Directory for user authentication and, of course, integration with enterprise resources via the intranet. Along with the public availability of the service, users can use the Amazon Workspace Sync for PC and Mac client to back up secure, automatic and continuous on Amazon S3 documents created and edited in a WorkSpaces.

Thanks to the brand known worldwide, Amazon will attempt to win market share from other companies already established in the field of enterprise cloud services, such as Microsoft, Citrix, Google and VMware.

Workspaces coupled with Trend Micro eases security concerns

Mark Nunnikhoven of Trend Micro spoke to Jeff Frick in The Cube at AWS Summit about how security affects Amazon Workspaces and a few tidbits related directly to how IT departments–operations and development–would benefit from using the cloud for virtualization.

For the most part, IT wants to deliver something easy that allows ops and dev to work at their own pace and in their own space without having to worry much about proprietary information slipping out. Virtualized desktops able to run across multiple devices and host themselves in the same space does a lot to ease worries of security concerns for both in-house and mobile development.

“Your data now lives in the AWS cloud and [Amazon] lets you access it from any of those devices, but the data always stays in that one place, so they’re trying to solve that problem of data everywhere by giving you access everywhere…” says Nunnikhoven. “Distributing access, if you don’t give your users access where they want it and when they want it, they’ll route around you… As a security provider we want to make sure that we’re providing tools that enable people to provide that access”

To make this easy on IT, Operations, and Dev, Trend Micro has seen a push to make life easier by providing a way to offload security–thus providing the developers-in-the-trenches needed protection without getting in their way.

“[AWS Summit] isn’t the traditional Enterprise buyers…it’s mainly developers, or operations folks, or DevOps folks, so we’re talking to the people who are actually doing the heavy lifting, and security is not their number one job,” Nunnikhoven adds. “They know they want secure applications, but at the end of the day they’re responsible for delivering a social app or a mobile game.”

Most beneficial to developers

By offering DaaS solution, Amazon wants to see the applications, games, and the entire desktop on the cloud. The solution will allow the creation and management of virtual desktops in the cloud, accessible from any device, while it will also allow developers to run application on the cloud that require large computing resources.

Amazon pitched its desktop-as-a-service offering as a more affordable approach to traditional VDI offered by Citrix, VMware and Microsoft. Amazon WorkSpaces offers the ability to run 3D games or interactive applications in high-resolution directly to the cloud. The contents are then sent to the end users stream and displayed on any device. Developers do not have to worry about the constraints imposed by the hardware (CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage), so that applications can run on tablets and smartphones.

Amazon WorkSpaces eliminates both the up-front investment and the ongoing management of on premise infrastructure while still offering all the security and efficiency of a centralized model. For a low monthly fee, developers can get a complete cloud-based desktop computing service including compute, persistent storage, and software applications.

Along with Amazon AppStream, which offers an SDK to support streaming applications, developers can use compute power without CPU and GPU constraints, and the ability to write applications once and stream to multiple device platforms. It can also use AWS resources–relational and NoSQL databases, persistent object storage, caching, message queues, publish and subscribe messaging, email delivery, and more.

For some, Amazon WorkSpaces is a bit late because there are already many service providers that offer hosted desktops as a service. In fact, earlier last month, Google announced a partnership with VMware to manage desktops, applications and data, leveraging DaaS, Blast/HTML5 and related technology. As part of the partnership, VMware will offer the DaaS virtual services for Chromebooks from Google. The idea is to run Windows applications on PCs running on Chrome OS. With managed services offering VMware on Chromebooks. However, the fact that Amazon Web Services is one of the main operators of public cloud, WorkSpaces promises a bright future.

Authors: Kyt Dotson and Saroj Kar contributed to this post.