Amazon WorkSpaces vs. HashiCorp Vagrant

For our use case, we found Amazon WorkSpaces well suited to remote work and other "work from home" and "work on the road" situations where the end user did not need to consume HD media (notably 4K) and did not need to produce any multimedia (audio, video, etc), but rather needed to perform more typical tasks such as web-browsing our corporate intranet and internal online apps, accessing files and using them through office productivity suites (Office - both online and desktop, and LibreOffice are under testing), etc.

Incentivized

If you're writing software, particularly software that depends on other services (web servers or databases for example) then Vagrant is great. I know some people skip Vagrant and just set up virtual machines on their own, but I've found that Vagrant streamlines the process nicely and makes it easy to update or swap out versions. If you're a web developer (which I am) it's amazing. I can have several boxes configured for my different projects and I just spin them up or down based on what I'm working on. One scenario where this might not be ideal is if you're running Vagrant on a computer that has limited resources. Since you're running a virtual machine with its own operating system and such you'll want a host computer with enough RAM, hard drive space and CPU to run the virtual machine properly without killing the performance of the host. The virtual disks can also take up a lot of space if you're not careful so if you have many virtual machines provisioned and don't clean up the old ones that you're not using, you may find that your hard drive is full. Each of my Linux servers take up about 10GB of disk space.

Incentivized

• It gives us a virtual desktop machine which is completely configurable.
• We can launch and terminate those machines as per our requirements
• It eliminates software conflicts as we get clean system every time on launch

Incentivized

• Easy to create machines with different OS's, list of them can be found from Vagrant's website with configuration details.
• Flexible configuration, user can determine what software will be pre-installed to machine. Saves time because it doesn't need to be done manually every time.
• Easily manage full environments, not just single machines, with single command.

Incentivized

• Restarting workspaces takes lot of time
• MFA can be done only via email. Text or dedicated app would be a great choice.

Incentivized

• Learning curve is steep - It can be challenging for someone to set up initially. After some coaching, the basics come pretty quickly though.
• Relies on external Virtual Machine applications - It would be great if Vagrant itself could run the virtual machine instead of leaning on other virtualization software. This is a small detail, but would make setup simple.
• Better support for running

Incentivized

Vagrant is fast, versatile and does exactly what we need it to do: spin up virtual servers for local development fast and without trouble.

Incentivized

For its Primary purpose in our organization, providing developers and testers a clean, isolated and configurable environments which saves hours. The usability is nearly perfect. Usability is only suffering when user is into more intensive task like any kind of graphic works. At that time user is not experiencing the smoothness like a local machine

Incentivized

A GUI would be nice for entry level users.

Incentivized

AWS support in general is pretty good, and WorkSpaces is no exception. We haven't had too much need for support but on the occasion we have, they've been quick to respond and helpful. Our issues have been resolved rapidly.

Incentivized

WorkSpaces (VDI) is a much more robust solution that competitor offerings when considering scalability and security. Amazon WorkSpaces has a substantial free tier to explore if this is the right solution for your project without purchasing other solutions. Considering this, AWS is a great solution to explore Virtual Desktop experiences and workstations for any growing remote business.

Incentivized

Docker has a few advantages, especially with the disk size bloat brought on by Vagrant's hosting an entire OS and project in a VM. It relies on native tools, however, and may not support every software. Vagrant provides uniformity, efficiency and repeatability within team work and for deployment and testing.

Incentivized

• Having a linux VM seems positive due to the security of the OS
• The Linux OS version sometimes is basic and requires extra apps to be installed

Incentivized

• Saved lots of time by being able to set up a local env quickly
• Occasionally made troubleshooting bugs harder than it would have been using native Linux
• Clients had issues setting it up, which may have provided us some security in keeping their business

Incentivized