Ubuntu Desktop In the Cloud

jimjimovich writes "One new feature in Ubuntu 10.04 that caught my attention is the Desktop in the Cloud project. Ubuntu already has great EC2 support, and it's getting even better. Now you can launch Ubuntu Desktop instances on EC2 and connect to them with an NX client."

Comments

Let's Open-Source the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Then we can run our own cloud and connect to it from wherever we want. There's a snowball's chance in hell I'm going to run my desktop on hardware that is out of my control, but for local applications, that might be interesting.

Re:Let's Open-Source the cloud

[geekboybt]

Done and done. http://www.eucalyptus.com/ - it even replicates the Amazon AWS API, and is available on Ubuntu.

Re:Let's Open-Source the cloud

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Holy OS Recursion, Batman!

Re:Let's Open-Source the cloud

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Alternately: "Yo dog, I heard you like Ubuntu so I put an Ubuntu on your Ubuntu so you can compute while you compute..."

NOOOOOOOOOO!

[Michael Kristopeit]

i seriously had to check if it was april 1st.

NX is a bitch: use XRDP instead

[lkcl]

whenever attempting to get FreeNX working, i've found it to be a total bitch, client-side as well as server-side. by contrast, rdesktop or any other RDP client, client-side and xrdp server-side (which is purely a matter of apt-get install xrdp on debian-based distributions) is so simple to install that a monkey could do it. demo of a monkey (myself) doing exactly that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbsydsar5Pk

Cost prohibitive?

[bsDaemon]

EC2 charges based on CPU time and bandwidth usage, so this sounds like it'd end up eating up a monthly fee of ~$netbook per month. Why would anybody want to spend their money on this?

Re:Cost prohibitive?

[e2d2]

Checking the EC2 pricing scheme:

Small Linux install: $.085 per hour
Up to the First 10TB of data transfer: 0.15 per GB

And it goes down as you add more instances in. So the cost may be relatively small.

But I wonder, if you are remoting to this machine, won't you be charged for twice the bandwidth if you are using it as your desktop to surf the web? Incoming data has to go to that instance first and then route to you. AFAIK you'll be charged for total bandwidth usage.

 

Re:Cost prohibitive?

[Hatta]

I'm not sure what the use case for this would be anyway. Sure you can access your desktop from everywhere, but where are you going to go that has terminals set up for NX? If you're hauling around a netbook anyway, why not just run a local desktop?

Re:Cost prohibitive?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The more interesting use case is probably to be found when you combine the existence of this project with the existence of Eucalyptus which somebody mentioned above. The fact that it works with EC2 is interesting; but paying Amazon is likely not cost effective(since demand for desktop seats tends not to fluctuate nearly as fast as some server loads do and is, in any case, constrained by the number of NX capable thin clients available) a service where you pay extra for the elasticity isn't obviously sensible.

WIth Eucalyptus, though, you can fairly easily run your own setup, keeping the bandwidth in house and thus cheap and abundant, easily spawning a desktop instance that is available to a given user across multiple machines, thin or fat, in your organization. Because of Linux's unixy legacy, which tends to make multi-user systems a good bit easier and more natural, this isn't as compelling as it is with Windows setups; but there are still purposes for which it could be nice.

I love that word, but have a suggestion.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

It'll be in the Cloud! It'll be grand! "What does that mean?" Oh, it doesn't matter. It's in the Cloud! Duuuuude! The CLOUD, man!

It seems to me that the Cloud is the end result of network engineers being too successful in dumbing down "all that network" stuff into an amorphous cloud in their Visio diagrams, in order to allay the concerns of micromanaging PHBs.

My suggestion is that we start calling it the Clod. Then at least we could get some entertainment value of out if. "Ubuntu Desktop in the Clod" and "Moving all your mission-critical resources to the Clod!", or "How can the Clod help YOUR business to succeed?"

Re:I love that word, but have a suggestion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for spending your afternoon coming up with that.

Re:I love that word, but have a suggestion.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Thank you for spending your afternoon coming up with that.

It's important that available resources are maximized to their full potential, in the Clod.

Re:I love that word, but have a suggestion.

[TeknoHog]

I'm a clod, you insensitive clod!

i never saw the point of cloud desktops

[alen]

hardware is dirt cheap and getting cheaper. you can buy a powerful server for cheap as well. but after you buy the Citrix or whatever licenses, a few more servers for redundancy, a ton of storage at enterprise prices, the enterprise hardware support, increase network bandwidth etc the savings vanish and it's cheaper to just buy regular desktop machines.

same thing with EC2. by the time you put in the network hardware and new circuits and pay Amazon for 24x7 instances it's cheaper to just buy desktops. i'm typing this on a 5 year old HP that runs windows 7 just fine.

i bet all this cloud nonsense is enterprise hardware companies trying to push higher margin products and no real trend that anyone is doing. the numbers just don't work out

Re:i never saw the point of cloud desktops

[ppanon]

Nope. What it is is the natural end-point after 10 years of outsourcing. When you get rid of the growth path for technical resources, eventually you get a profound lack of availability of senior technical resources. At that point you have no choice but to push everything IT-related out to external vendors because you can't hire internal resources to do it (or even just to manage the process) and must rely on external vendors who can maximize use of those types of resources across multiple clients. However you also no longer have the skills available to know if the vendor is taking you to the cleaners, or cutting corners on management/security to raise profits and significantly putting your data at risk. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Madoff-level disaster with a "cloud" provider sometime in the next 10 years.

Re:Which EC2?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I guess that one is used for mushroom cloud computing...