AWS Everyday - App Stream 2.0

What to do with all of those pesky Windows fat clients that you can't get rid of?

2023 will finally be the year of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)! Well no. Citrix has merged with Tibco, and VMware’s End User Compute (EUC) business hasn’t innovated in a long time. However, what do you do with that legacy data analytics app that your data scientists won’t let go of? It has to be close to the data in AWS, so installing it on a local desktop isn’t an option. You don’t want to give a data scientist a whole Windows EC2 instance.

We’d install a presentation platform in the traditional data center, such as Citrix or VMware Horizon. The client software runs on a handful of servers next to the data. The presentation server has a gateway. That gateway is the front end for users to access the applications in either a browser or a client.

App presentation sounds simple in practice. However, there’s nothing simple about administering any of these solutions. We installed VMware EUC in our data center for remote access. From security vulnerabilities and the level of overhead, we moved to a browser-based VPN and remote desktop as a solution. Look at this 19-minute video to get up and running with a simple set of applications. This service requires professional services or training in any organization of scale.

Corey Quinn - Will it Database?

AppStream 2: This supports “any application that runs on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, or Amazon Linux 2.” All of those applications are (obviously) databases, which makes AppStream 2.0 also a database.