Announcing the NICE DCV Access Console

We are pleased to announce the NICE DCV Access Console, a simple web-based component that allows customers to centralize their DCV session management. This product complements the existing DCV Session Manager, a tool that manages the lifecycle of DCV sessions across a fleet of DCV servers. The DCV Access Console provides an out-of-the-box solution for administrators to centrally manage those sessions, control user and group authorization, and visualize the underlying resources. For end users, the DCV Access Console makes it easy to create and launch new sessions on any DCV client.

The DCV Session Manager broker provides an API endpoint for administrators to manage their DCV sessions at scale. Traditionally, implementing the broker involves building a frontend web interface for end users and administrators to easily interact with the APIs. This development leads to additional operational overhead and valuable engineering time. The DCV Access Console addresses that complexity by providing the missing frontend framework to streamline the DCV session management experience. The usage of the DCV Access Console is available at no additional cost for both AWS and on-premises DCV deployments.

Architecture

The diagram above illustrates a DCV Access Console architecture. In the diagram, end users are securely connecting from the public internet. DCV Access Console also supports isolated environments where end users and administrators connect from the private network.

Getting started

The DCV Access Console consists of three components – the Authentication Server, the Web Client, and the Handler. The Authentication Server authorizes administrator and user access to the Web Client, which is the user-interface of the Access Console. The Web Client forwards user interactions to the Handler. The Hander translates the forwarded interactions into API calls to the DCV Session Manager broker. All three components can be configured on a single host, for the simplest configuration, or multiple, to achieve high availability. The separation between these components allows builders to deploy the DCV Access Console in an architecture that meets their core business requirements. The communication between these components is illustrated in the diagram below.

Flow of components

The DCV Access Console requires an existing DCV Session Manager environment. If you have an existing DCV Session Manager environment, you can refer to the dcv-access-console AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) in the dcv-samples Github repository. If you do not have an existing DCV Session Manager environment, you can deploy one of the foundational CDKs found in the dcv-samples Github repository. Visit our DCV Access Console Administrator Guide for additional requirements and setup procedure.

Summary

In this blog post, we introduced the DCV Access Console. You learned how this component simplifies scalable DCV deployments that require the DCV Session Manager broker. We outlined the fundamental components that the DCV Access Console is comprised of and provided references to CDKs to quickly get started. For a video overview of the DCV Access Console, see the announcement video series on the HPC Tech Shorts YouTube channel.

Julia joined AWS in 2022 as a Technical Product Manager for NICE DCV. She is responsible for understanding our customers’ feedback, and using that to shape the product’s vision and direction.