What does this AWS Solution do?
Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution which runs on AWS. With Amazon WorkSpaces, you can easily provision virtual, cloud-based Microsoft Windows desktops for your users, providing them access to the documents, applications, and resources they need, anywhere, anytime, from any supported device. Amazon WorkSpaces offers the flexibility to pay hourly or monthly without any up-front commitment.
To help customers with unpredictable WorkSpace usage patterns monitor their Amazon WorkSpaces usage and optimize costs, AWS offers the Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer, a solution that analyzes all of your WorkSpace usage data and automatically converts the WorkSpace to the most cost-effective billing option (hourly or monthly) depending on the user's individual usage. This solution is easy to deploy and uses AWS CloudFormation to automatically provision and configure the necessary AWS services.
The following section assumes basic knowledge of architecting on the AWS Cloud, virtual desktops and Amazon WorkSpaces.
AWS Solution overview
AWS offers a solution that automatically converts WorkSpaces to the most cost-effective billing option (hourly or monthly) depending on a user's individual usage. The diagram below presents the Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer architecture you can automatically deploy using the solution’s implementation guide and accompanying AWS CloudFormation template.
Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer solution architecture
This solution deploys an Amazon CloudWatch event that invokes an AWS Lambda function every 24 hours. The Lambda function leverages Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to create an AWS Fargate task definition to poll AWS Directory Service to gather a list of all directories registered for Amazon WorkSpaces in a specific AWS Region.
The Fargate task checks each WorkSpace for total usage for the month and converts the WorkSpace to the most efficient billing model depending on usage. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) stores a log file with the conversions.
Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer
Version 2.2
Last updated: 12/2019
Author: AWS
Estimated deployment time: 5 min
Features
Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer reference implementation
Automatic WorkSpaces conversion
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