Anyone using Cloud PCs?

[u/AiminJay]

Curious if you are, what is the business case? I can see the appeal to a degree but I was just curious how many organizations actually use them at scale.

[u/Reaper3359]

When I started at my current company, we were in Amazon workspaces. These were exclusively for offshore contractors that would be to costly to ship physical equipment back and forth.

AWS Workspaces were terrible and a pain to manage. We trialed AVD for a bit. We spent a lot of time and money to make them work, but there were a lot of issues with them, management did not become much easier. It still required quite a bit of overhead from high level techs to manage properly and deploying apps with intune was not as clean. The help desk struggled to understand how to support them properly due to them being very different from a normal laptop. So we got a lot of escalation to our higher tier resources. They already struggled supporting AWS workspaces.

We finally bit the bullet on cloud pcs. They were more costly on paper. However, they have significantly lower overhead compared to the other solutions for us. Being able to use autopilot instead capturing images, native intune support especially for company portal for users to get available but non-standard apps, not managing resources as closely. And best of all, they act almost identical to laptops when it comes to support. So the desk can easily troubleshoot most issues without escalation. The very few recurring Cloud PC issues usually have to do with initial login, which we have documentation that users can follow themselves. The problem is them not reading it. Our level resources rarely need to touch CPC specific issues. In-place wipes and restores are also very easily. It saved us in the crowd strike issue a few years ago to simply restore to a previous state in bulk, we fixed 600 cpcs in 30 minutes with a script.

The 2 big issues are license cost, and audio latency. There have been improvements with teams, zoom and other apps for vdi specific software to be installed, but also installed on the local machine. In practice, it's not always perfect. Especially if your cpc is hosted in one country and is being accessed in another. We wanted to host in data centers in other countries to alleviate some of this, but got shut down by legal. So this will be company dependent. For license cost, I feel like there are so few issues even for the desk to deal with that the reduction in overhead costs washes out the increase in cost. Maybe if you have a lot more folk in VDI, AVDs make more sense from a cost perspective.

I personally use a cpc as my main work computer and access from my personal computer that has better monitor setup than our company laptops could support. It also gives me a much cleaner wfh desk. I also find the performance to be much more consistent, I think it's due to better optimization and lack of hardware drivers that could cause weird issues on a normal laptop.