Wow. These two announcements from Amazon today have been really interesting. I work at a community college and we're constantly investigating VDI and vApp solutions. With the heavy push towards a more cloud-ready infrastructure, it'll be interesting to see how our upper management approaches this platform. A lot of ya'll seem to be arguing about gaming -- but I see other highly demanding software being used -- CAD, Maya, Blender, AfterEffects, etc. All of which will be on-demand. We won't have to invest so heavily in up front hardware costs just to handle our typical overwhelming periods.
[anecdote] We've licensed our CAD software to have 100 "seats" available at any time. We also (try to) reserve that much hardware to be available. We only ever see maybe a 5-10% utilization throughout the semester with ~200% utilization in the last 3 weeks of the semester (When util >100%, users are queued). That's a lot of waste and still isn't acceptable to the majority of our professors and student body. While it'd be great if we could retask that hardware to justify its cost when not in use, we simply can't. We need that hardware to be available for these applications at a minute's notice.
I can see this being a huge win for education or independent studios who are just starting out.
[anecdote] We've licensed our CAD software to have 100 "seats" available at any time. We also (try to) reserve that much hardware to be available. We only ever see maybe a 5-10% utilization throughout the semester with ~200% utilization in the last 3 weeks of the semester (When util >100%, users are queued). That's a lot of waste and still isn't acceptable to the majority of our professors and student body. While it'd be great if we could retask that hardware to justify its cost when not in use, we simply can't. We need that hardware to be available for these applications at a minute's notice.
I can see this being a huge win for education or independent studios who are just starting out.