The Super Power of Cloud Desktops? Self-Service VDI Elasticity

This blog series is exploring the evolution of the Cloud Desktop Fabric™, the next-generation architecture for virtual desktops at the edge of the cloud and the implications for enterprises. If you missed last week’s blog, definitely take a few minutes to have a look. This week let’s explore how to take advantage of self-service Cloud Desktop elasticity.

How to Get a Virtual Desktop Anywhere in the World in 60 Minutes

Let’s say you have contract developers in multiple locations around the world.  Shashi, a developer based in India, needs a particular GPU desktop, and she needs it fast – within minutes of approval by her boss. Now what do you do?

Shashi opens up ServiceNow, her company’s IT service catalog. She finds a pre-defined offering for a 2-CPU machine, with GPU, and 16 GB RAM in the catalog. Perfect! She submits a request for the virtual desktop. Shashi’s request then flows through a standard business process which results in her manager approving the request. This kicks off automation that invokes an integration with Workspot APIs. A virtual desktop is quickly spun up for Shashi in the cloud region closest to her, and a few minutes later she receives an email with the instructions on how to access it. When she does, she experiences cloud desktop performance with less than 25ms latency.

The upshot: within minutes of the original request, our developer has access to exactly the right cloud desktop, hosted in the local cloud region in India, and she is productive immediately, experiencing  better performance than a physical PC could.  Her cloud desktop has all the apps and configurations she needs to start using it immediately. The best part: This super-efficient process for getting that desktop is exactly the same for developers in any region of the world.

Workspot & ServiceNow Integration Enables Cloud Desktop
Provisioning in Minutes

Self-Service Elasticity is the Super Power of Cloud Desktops

Let’s think about this metaphor of a “fabric”, and for a moment, take it literally. So, let’s “stretch” the metaphor a bit more (pun intended). You may want to stretch the fabric into new cloud regions because you have a new office coming on board in the Philippines. Or you may want to stretch the fabric to reach India because you are adding more users in there.  The global desktop “fabric” is both elastic and resilient.

Before the invention of the power loom, a blanket might have been made by handiwork out of scraps of hand-woven cloth, creating a patchwork quilt. This is an apt description of the state of most VDI solutions – especially when built-out over multiple regions. At best, you will have a mix of virtual machines, networks, policies, configurations, scripts, and who knows what other bits and pieces. As fabrics go, quilts may be interesting to look at, but in the VDI world, that interesting mix of piece parts requires too much manual effort to stretch within one region, let alone across multiple regions.

By contrast, the word “fabric” suggests something machine-made; the raw material has been transformed into potentially complex, repeating patterns that produce something that is both simple to use and resilient. In the case of a Cloud Desktop Fabric™, the infrastructure has been “woven” into a reliable, interlinked, regular network of services. This architecture is fundamentally easier to define, manage, and perhaps most importantly, stretch! It’s elegant in its simplicity, yet it’s also robust and performs flawlessly in a variety of conditions.

Enter the Cloud Desktop Fabric™

With the right architecture, an on-demand, elastic Cloud Desktop solution is available to you readily. Workspot customers simply select their cloud desktop and cloud workstations configurations and images, and their enterprise use cases are quickly deployed using Workspot’s ground-breaking elastic infrastructure layer called the Cloud Desktop Fabric. This is a single pane of glass that provisions and manages cloud desktops in the Azure regions closest to each of your employees, contractors, and partners – often less than 25 ms away – for low latency that means amazing performance, wherever they are. Best of all, as your deployment needs change, the fabric is always ready to accommodate them.

The Workspot Cloud Desktop Fabric Architecture for VDI

The bottom line: The Cloud Desktop Fabric is more than a high-performance desktop deployment architecture: it actually takes end user computing to a new level – now it’s a global, elastic utility. In an upcoming post, we will discuss the concept of the Cloud Desktop “dial tone”, and how the Cloud Desktop Fabric architecture enables it.

How is this a Game Changer?

Consider what is involved in expanding legacy VDI into a new geographical region. You would have to:

• Set up the network infrastructure, storage, and other base resources in every new region
• Provision VMs to run required infrastructure, such as protocol gateways & virtual desktop templates
• Configure a virtual desktop pool for every new region
• Configure the correct users for the correct pools

Now, repeat that for every, single. region.  Imagine keeping track of it all, managing it, keeping track of upgrades, and so on. Once you start to figure out all the hard and soft costs, you should really be wondering if it is worth the effort and if there is a better way.

Even when using a traditional desktop-as-a-service provider, if you need virtual desktops across multiple regions, the provider has to go through all those same activities, and the cost of managing it all will be passed on to you. If you have any doubts about whether they have the right architecture to handle it, it’s time to schedule a demo with Workspot.