I’m super excited to share that our Stratusphere appliance is now supported on EC2 in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This is exciting for a number of reasons, but overall it’s a great way to get started with Stratusphere for use cases where off-premise hosting is of value. We envision two clear uses—user assessment or onboarding, and validation of machine performance in cloud-based virtual workspaces.

Regardless of the delivery approach, it is critically important to know your user behaviors, application use, PC workload consumption and overall user experience. Stratusphere has been able to assist in these cases for on premise installations, and now can do the same for those who wish to deploy our Stratusphere Appliance in the cloud.

Assessment/Onboarding Projects and Meeting Expected Service Levels

As you may already know, Stratusphere is a solution that supports many different needs throughout the lifecycle of the user’s workspace. It is the assessment and design support solution for building a virtual infrastructure (think VDI or published application platforms); it is worth highlighting that this step would typically also include Workspaces tier determination. In the case of cloud-based workloads it is critical to ensure you provision users in the proper service tier—overprovisioning means you are paying for cloud workspace resources you may not need. And under provisioning means a user will always be resource constrained.

Stratusphere is is also the user experience monitoring and diagnostics solution to operationalize and support troubleshooting, optimization and remediation activities. Most important, it is the solution to baseline the user experience to ensure users obtain an appropriate level of performance, regardless of the Windows delivery approach. This is where you’re the SLA rubber meets the road.

In some cases Stratusphere is deployed as a project, whereby user, application and machine-based metrics are collected. With this new EC2 support, you are able to provision a solution in your own, secure, Amazon virtual private cloud (VPC) to perform assessments and user onboarding exercises. This is especially beneficial to organizations with very distributed user locations looking to explore a more centralized desktop workspace.

Another use for Stratusphere on AWS is to support an in-guest view of cloud-delivered desktops; for example Amazon’s VDI solution WorkSpaces, offers an almost limitless infrastructure and scalability resources. But as any long-term virtual desktop administrator will tell you … this does not equate to a happy and satisfied user. The in-guest view provided by Stratusphere on EC2 will allow organizations to keep tabs on the user experience, in addition to the rich set of infrastructure metrics provided by Amazon.

Getting Started

Should you want to run Stratusphere on AWS, we’ve made a number of resources available to you. Have a look at our updated installation guide that includes details on AWS-based installs. We also have a short video step-by-step video and an updated online sizing guide to provide details on appliance resources needs.

We’ve been working hard with the Amazon Web Services Team and could not be more pleased with this new Stratusphere platform support. Please let us know how you’re using Stratusphere in the cloud.