Amazon Workspaces DaaS Now Generally Available

The desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced in November at the AWS re:Invent conference is now generally available. The public cloud giant announced WorkSpaces in an effort to take on the likes of DaaS providers including VMware (VMW), Microsoft (MSFT) and Citrix (CTXS).

Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at Amazon Web Services, wrote in a blog post about the general availability of WorkSpaces and noted that during its limited preview the DaaS offering was tested in companies of all sizes in a variety of applications, from corporate desktops to engineering workstations.

The DaaS offering is now available to all AWS customers. Barr outlined a few more details regarding the use of WorkSpaces in the blog post, and he also noted that a mobile version is also available that works with iPad, Kindle Fire HDX and Android tablets.

Pricing for the new offering ranges from $35 to $75 per WorkSpace per month. And it’s currently available through two AWS regions—specifically, US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon). Comments on Barr’s blog seem to indicate customers and partners are hoping Amazon will quickly expand the regions WorkSpaces is available, and that’s understandable; It’s a potentially huge opportunity for Amazon and its partners, and it’s something that customers already accustomed to the world of Amazon may be quite interested in.

It’s hardly without its competitors, of course. VMware, which is no stranger to the virtual desktop space, launched its own Horizon DaaS offering earlier this month. And the market is getting crowded, with a variety of vendors and cloud services providers joining in on the DaaS fray.

But according to AWS, its customers have been requesting a DaaS solution for the past couple of years. And although it may not become a core product, it’s a potential value-add for Amazon in a space that has traditionally been owned by the likes of VMware and Citrix.