Amazon AppStream 2.0
Amazon AppStream 2.0 — rebranded Amazon WorkSpaces Applications — is an Amazon Web Services service that delivers managed Windows virtual desktops and applications to remote employees over a secure network connection.
Key points
- Renamed Amazon WorkSpaces Applications as AWS consolidates its desktop and app-streaming services under the Amazon WorkSpaces family; existing APIs, consoles, and functionality carry over under the new name.
- Streams desktops and applications to remote employees rather than requiring a locally installed copy.
- Delivered over a secure network connection, similar in intent to Amazon WorkSpaces but focused on streaming individual applications rather than provisioning a persistent full desktop per user.
- Sits in the End User Computing category of AWS services, alongside Amazon WorkSpaces.
- Lets applications with heavy hardware requirements (e.g. high CPU/GPU) run on lightweight, low-cost client devices, since the actual processing happens on AWS instances and only the display is streamed to the client.
- Fleet types are Always-On (instances always running), On-Demand (instances start on user connection, roughly a 1–2 minute wait), and Elastic (serverless; the instance pool is managed automatically). The General Purpose instance family spans five sizes, from
stream.standard.smallup tostream.standard.2xlarge(8 vCPUs / 32 GiB memory).