Deploying and managing Amazon WorkSpaces applications with Ansible

Amazon WorkSpaces provides administrators with a fully managed virtual desktop infrastructure, which scales on-demand, with no up-front commitment costs. Amazon available in Microsoft Windows, Amazon Linux 2, and Ubuntu based versions.

Foundational challenges with the maintenance of a persistent virtual desktop infrastructure include the management of application deployments and patching status validation. This is especially true when dealing with a cross platform fleet.

Red Hat Ansible® provides administrators with a free and open-source system for managing a fleet at scale. Ansible has robust cross platform support, leveraging the Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) on Linux and Windows Remote Management (WinRM) or SSH on Windows.

If you are interested in learning how to use Ansible to build a comprehensive management solution for your Amazon WorkSpaces, join us at re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas. I am hosting a workshop session, “EUC204: Deploying and managing Amazon WorkSpaces applications with Ansible” on Thursday, November 30, at 11:30 AM PST. Find the details of this session, reserve your seat for EUC204, and view the entire re:Invent 2023 session catalog today.

This is a hands-on workshop. Please bring your laptop to participate! This session is intended for end user compute administrators and IT professionals. You do not need an AWS account. We provision AWS accounts for the duration of the workshop.

Attendees are hands-on within the first 20 minutes of the workshop. Each participant operates a lab environment where they will deploy an Ansible server, and use that Ansible server to perform various tasks. The lab uses a mixed operating system WorkSpaces environment, featuring Windows, Amazon Linux 2, and Ubuntu WorkSpaces. During the workshop, multiple AWS End User Computing experts will facilitate this session to answer questions, and work with you one-on-one as needed.

At the end of this workshop, we’ll open it for audience questions and discussion. I look forward to seeing you there and helping you get started using Ansible to administer your WorkSpaces!

To learn more about the event and sign up for this session, please see the details below. Be sure to visit the team at the AWS End User Computing kiosk 7 at the expo Village in the Venetian. For guidance regarding all EUC activities at re:Invent 2023, see the AWS End User Computing at re:Invent 2023: A sneak peek! blog post

Dan is a Senior AWS End User Compute Solutions Architect, focusing on helping customers configure and optimize end-user computing solutions. Dan also focuses on EC2, Microsoft, and Linux based workloads. Dan has been at AWS since March 2016, and was a Premium Support escalation engineer and Specialist Technical Account Manager prior to becoming a specialist Solutions Architect.