Announcing updates to NICE DCV AWS CloudFormation Templates

AWS customers looking to experience the NICE DCV streaming protocol can now utilize the latest DCV AWS CloudFormation template. This template is intended for proof-of-concepts and deploys a single Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance preconfigured with DCV server ready to accept connections. This is an automated way to gain firsthand experience of the DCV high-performance remote display protocol.

What’s New

The updated template offers new improvements that make it more accessible and flexible for you to deploy. The latest template is automatically used when deploying through the DCV CloudFormation page.

Inherited DCV optimizations and flexibility

DCV offers an extensive set of configurations and optimizations for your DCV session stream. With the latest CloudFormation template, you inherit several of these options by default. Whether you deploy Windows or Linux, QUIC streaming is activated allowing UDP-based session streams for a fluent streaming experience. The template allows you to define your streaming port, EBS volume size, customize the default user password, and target a specific EC2 key pair. To ensure access is limited to necessary parties, the template allows you to define what CIDR range is allow listed on the machine’s security group. To mitigate session management, the template enables automatic session creation. Lastly, to provide a seamless file upload experience, the template configures DCV session storage.

Public DCV AMIs

The DCV team maintains several public AWS Marketplace DCV AMIs that bundle the DCV server software in both Windows and Linux operating systems. The previous version of the template utilized public base AMIs; automating the installation and configuration of the operating system to activate DCV streaming. The latest template now leverages the Marketplace DCV image pipeline. This minimizes deployment time and reduces complexity, making it simpler to customize the template for your requirements. In addition, this will provide the latest DCV release for your testing.

Additional supported network configurations

The previous version of the template required a default Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). This may be a blocker for customers who do not use default VPCs or need to target a specific VPC within their environment. This template update allows for additional flexibility when deploying your DCV server through CloudFormation. The updated template supports three network configurations:

• A default VPC and public subnet:
  • Use this to deploy the EC2 instance to the AWS Region’s default VPC.
• A new VPC and public subnet:
  • Use this to deploy the EC2 instance to a new VPC and public subnet created by the template.
• A user specified public subnet:
  • Use this to deploy the EC2 instance to an existing public subnet within a VPC in your account.

When using the DCV template, you will incur costs on the running EC2 instances; DCV is free to use on AWS. To learn more and get started using the updated DCV CloudFormation template, visit the DCV CloudFormation page and follow the deployment procedure.

Joel has more than 19 years of experience working in various roles of software development primarily in the virtualization and End User Computing (EUC) spaces. He joined AWS in 2022 as a Senior System Dev Engineer with a passion for automation and all things cloud related.