Amazon AppStream 2.0 and Amazon WorkSpaces announcements and launches – August

Our team has been hard at work and we have launched new technical documents, webinars, and more. This blog post focuses on our recent documentation, webinars, and resources that we think you can get the most out of:

Documentation

Best Practices for Deploying Amazon WorkSpaces
This whitepaper outlines a set of best practices for the deployment of Amazon WorkSpaces. The paper covers network considerations, directory services and user authentication, security, and monitoring and logging.

Best Practices for VPCs and Networking in Amazon WorkSpaces Deployments -This document describes the fundamental capabilities of the AWS networking portfolio that can be used to deploy an Amazon WorkSpaces environment and explains how these can be used to tailor the environment to different use cases.

Best Practices to Prepare your Amazon WorkSpaces for Linux Images – This whitepaper outlines a set of best practices for the image preparation of Amazon WorkSpaces for Linux. The paper covers Well-Architected Principles applied to image design, the make-up of an Amazon WorkSpace, the Bundle and Image process for Amazon WorkSpaces, and methodologies for Image management. The paper addresses best practices for operating system updates, remote protocol configuration, application deployment, and desktop experience configuration of MATE.

Running Adobe Creative Cloud on Amazon AppStream 2.0 – This guide helps cloud architects to build an Amazon AppStream 2.0 environment and deploy Adobe Creative Cloud applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro to users. Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of 20+ desktop and mobile apps and services for photography, design, video, web, UX and more.

Webinars

How to Manage and Optimize your Amazon WorkSpaces and AppStream 2.0 Implementations – In this tech talk, you will learn to take advantage of Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon AppStream 2.0 features and services to manage and optimize your implementation. This tech talk is designed for IT Directors, administrators, and customers looking to better understand topics such as cost, bundles, instance types, fleet management, and simplifying their current implementations.

How Amazon is Using Amazon WorkSpaces to Enable Work from Home for Employees and Contingent Workforce – Designed for organizations that are setting up or optimizing work from home scenarios, we will share how Amazon WorkSpaces can enable employees and contractors to access their desktops from any supported device from any location. In this session, Karl McGough, manager of Amazon’s Client Engineering team will share how they have scaled their WorkSpaces deployment to enable work from home, and Meg Maciolek, Sr. Program Manager from Amazon’s Contingent Workforce team will share how they enable contractors to onboard without visiting the IT department. Jeff Barr, AWS Chief Evangelist will also share how he uses Amazon WorkSpaces to work from anywhere.

Best Practices to Automate your Amazon End User Computing Deployments
In this tech talk, we will cover key automation options for creating, managing, and optimizing your Amazon End User Compute Services at scale. Amazon End User Compute services include Amazon AppStream 2.0, Amazon WorkDocs, and Amazon WorkSpaces managed services. Using best practice customer examples, we will discuss topics including environment optimization, application deployment and patch life cycles, integration with joiners and leavers programs, monitoring and migration using Cloud Formation, Amazon SDK Scripting, and third party tools.

Features

AppStream 2.0 Adds Support For The Native Desktop Experience – Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for enabling the standard Windows desktop experience on your fleets.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 Now Supports Local Printer Redirection – Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for local printer redirection with the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. With local printer redirection, AppStream 2.0 users can redirect print jobs from their streaming application to a printer that is connected to their local computer. No printer driver needs to be installed on the AppStream 2.0 streaming instance to enable users to print documents during their streaming sessions.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 Now Supports Drawing Tablets – Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for drawing tablets. Drawing tablets, also known as pen tablets, are computer input devices that let users draw with a stylus (pen). With AppStream 2.0, your users can now connect a drawing tablet, such as a Wacom drawing tablet, to their local computer and use it with their streaming applications. AppStream 2.0 supports all of the core capabilities of drawing tablets, including pressure sensitivity.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 Now Supports EC2 g4dn Instances – Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for Graphics g4dn instances based on the EC2 G4 family. EC2 g4dn instances deliver the industry’s most cost-effective and versatile GPU instance for running graphics-intensive applications on AWS. g4dn provides the latest generation NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU, AWS custom Intel Cascade Lake CPUs, up to 100 Gbps of networking throughput, and up to 1.8 TB of local NVMe storage. These instances are ideal for streaming graphics-intensive applications that rely on NVIDIA GPU libraries such as CUDA.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for native application mode on Windows PCs – Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for native application mode in the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. Native application mode for streaming provides a familiar experience for AppStream 2.0 users by letting them interact with their remote streaming applications in the same way as they interact with locally installed applications. In addition, users can switch seamlessly between locally installed applications and remote applications that are streamed through AppStream 2.0.

Conclusion

The Desktop and Application Streaming Blog Round Up is designed to provide readers and customers a summary of some of the work we have recently completed. For more information please visit the Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon AppStream 2.0 web pages.