No Worries, Stream WINDOWS from the Cloud

[w4rm]

Hey,
Since Windows won’t be supported with Apple products that use ARM. I‘m seeing a lot of people upset.

I recommend checking out Shadow or similar services Cloud Computing services, they’ve been gaining traction. You pay $15 a month and get your own dedicated Windows in the cloud with 1080 GTX graphics. They also regularly update their systems with the latest hardware. It’s pretty affordable when you compare to buying a system

They even have options for Titan RTX

It’s great for gaming and even easier for video editing in in premiere. If it can handle those, I’m sure it will be easy for other kinds of apps.

There’s an app for iPad, iOS and Mac And it’s the best one I’ve tried, I‘m really far from their closest server and I’m still able to play games pretty well.

That said with 5G it’s only going to be more of a viable options for most people.

It’s crazy to be able to play AAA PC games on my iPad Pro and the battery life is great since it’s just encoding the video stream. I can connect my Xbox controller too and it’s responsive.

I think Cloud Desktop Computing is going to become huge with Apple ARM since it’s really the only good option. You basically rent out your own dedicated system and can access it from any system. And it’s faster than virtualization.

Shadow Shop - Subscribe to Shadow

shop.shadow.tech

What’s ya’ll thoughts?

 

[sevoneone]

That pricing seems too good to be true... You can't even run a VM with .25 of a CPU core and 1GB or RAM on Google or Amazon's clouds for that, not even taking the license for the OS into account... I just can't see how they're making any money. Also, that is a service for gamers, it is not going to have the service level agreements and guarantees that would make me comfortable relying on it for anything business related.

 

[w4rm]

That pricing seems too good to be true... You can't even run a VM with .25 of a CPU core and 1GB or RAM on Google or Amazon's clouds for that, not even taking the license for the OS into account... I just can't see how they're making any money. Also, that is a service for gamers, it is not going to have the service level agreements and guarantees that would make me comfortable relying on it for anything business related.

It’s pretty popular check out their reddit they’ve been around for a few years it’s a solid community. There’s a lot of people using it for business related stuff too.

The video explains the economics of their system, it’s very clever.

r/ShadowPC

The official subreddit of Shadow. Your high-end cloud PC, accessible on any device you own.

www.reddit.com

Maybe you can find out about service level agreements in the reddit or contact Shadow directly, they have amazing support.

Also you don’t have to use it for gaming. Gaming is the most common use for it. But it’s just a Windows client that’s yours to do as you want.

People are using it for AI research because of the GPU’s etc.

Regardless, I think that this is going to be future of virtualization. More and more services are going to come up like this because of Apple ARM.

 

[Jmausmuc]

That pricing seems too good to be true... You can't even run a VM with .25 of a CPU core and 1GB or RAM on Google or Amazon's clouds for that, not even taking the license for the OS into account... I just can't see how they're making any money. Also, that is a service for gamers, it is not going to have the service level agreements and guarantees that would make me comfortable relying on it for anything business related.

A VM is used as a server which usually runs 24/7 hosting some kind of service.
The Shadow VMs are onlineyours as long as you use them. When you stop it willbecome available for somebody else.

 

[w4rm]

A VM is used as a server which usually runs 24/7 hosting some kind of service.
The Shadow VMs are onlineyours as long as you use them. When you stop it willbecome available for somebody else.

No one has access to your Windows computer. It comes with a clean version of Windows and you install apps and games yourself. And it’s available to access anytime. You can play 24/7 if you want. No Servers are allow though.

Shadow and similar services are a great alternative for those who need to use Windows to use anything other than hosting a Server, since using Windows as a VM Server in Shadow is currently against their terms. But I’m sure there’s other cloud services that allow that and will do with the transition to ARM. Like Paperspace VM or Docker?

All I’m saying is that there’s already alternatives to having Windows on the Mac that even work on the iPad. People rely on Bootcamp for a lot more things than just VM Servers. Also Parallels is allowing Linux on Apple ARM. So servers can be only be run from Linux locally.

 

[johngwheeler]

That pricing seems too good to be true... You can't even run a VM with .25 of a CPU core and 1GB or RAM on Google or Amazon's clouds for that, not even taking the license for the OS into account... I just can't see how they're making any money. Also, that is a service for gamers, it is not going to have the service level agreements and guarantees that would make me comfortable relying on it for anything business related.

Well, you can run a 2 vCPU/8GB Windows instance on AWS for that price if you only run it a few hours a day, but not with GPU support. But I agree $15 per month for a gaming spec VM is pretty good...The AWS equivalent of good specc'd desktop PC ( 8 vCPU, 15 GiB Memory, 1 GPU, 4 GiB Video Memory ) costs US$731 a month! Presumably this allows you to run it 24x7, but it's a huge difference.
[automerge]1593071281[/automerge]

A VM is used as a server which usually runs 24/7 hosting some kind of service.
The Shadow VMs are onlineyours as long as you use them. When you stop it willbecome available for somebody else.

Yes, obviously they aren't allowing you to keep much of your own data on them or assuming that they have 24x7 availability. Does Shadow apply any usage caps? For gaming this isn't important.

It's still a VM however long you run it for. I spin up and shut down AWS VMs all the time for short development jobs. They only take a few seconds to start.

 

[w4rm]

Well, you can run a 2 vCPU/8GB Windows instance on AWS for that price if you only run it a few hours a day, but not with GPU support. But I agree $15 per month for a gaming spec VM is pretty good...The AWS equivalent of good specc'd desktop PC ( 8 vCPU, 15 GiB Memory, 1 GPU, 4 GiB Video Memory ) costs US$731 a month! Presumably this allows you to run it 24x7, but it's a huge difference.
[automerge]1593071281[/automerge]


Yes, obviously they aren't allowing you to keep much of your own data on them or assuming that they have 24x7 availability. Does Shadow apply any usage caps? For gaming this isn't important.

It's still a VM however long you run it for. I spin up and shut down AWS VMs all the time for short development jobs. They only take a few seconds to start.

The different pricing tiers have different storage specs it starts with 256 GB but you can easily upgrade, I think it’s $5 per 500 GB

 

[Erehy Dobon]

What’s ya’ll thoughts?

While your details about gaming offerings is useful to some, I will point out that Windows in the cloud is nothing new.

I signed up for a one-year free trial subscription for Amazon EC2 five years ago and ran MS Office and Quicken in a cloud-based instance of Windows Server 2012 (I think), accessible via Remote Desktop. Being in the free tier performance was deprioritized but nothing I was running required much of CPU cycles.

A lot of people make it sound like Apple's migration to Apple Silicon is the end of the world and that this is unchartered waters, but that is simply not the case in most discussions.

I did this over FIVE years ago as a hobbyist and not some sort of weird evangelical technologist. And it didn't take me a lot of effort either.

Hell, I kicked desktop Linux back to the curb in 2002 for a boatload of reasons (90% of which are still valid today in 2020 based on my recent experience with Raspbian). Accessing Windows in the cloud takes up about one-tenth the effort as running a stupid ass Linux desktop system.

 

[johngwheeler]

While your details about gaming offerings is useful to some, I will point out that Windows in the cloud is nothing new.

I signed up for a one-year free trial subscription for Amazon EC2 five years ago and ran MS Office and Quicken in a cloud-based instance of Windows Server 2012 (I think), accessible via Remote Desktop. Being in the free tier performance was deprioritized but nothing I was running required much of CPU cycles.

A lot of people make it sound like Apple's migration to Apple Silicon is the end of the world and that this is unchartered waters, but that is simply not the case in most discussions.

I did this over FIVE years ago as a hobbyist and not some sort of weird evangelical technologist. And it didn't take me a lot of effort either.

Hell, I kicked desktop Linux back to the curb in 2002 for a boatload of reasons (90% of which are still valid today in 2020 based on my recent experience with Raspbian). Accessing Windows in the cloud takes up about one-tenth the effort as running a stupid ass Linux desktop system.

Amen to that! I have had several experiments using desktop Linux as my "daily driver" and while you *can* do a lot with it, there are enough gotchas to make it a pain - mostly around the availability of commercial software. Libre Office and GIMP are "OK", but can have issues if you have to interoperate with MS Office and Photoshop..

I like desktop Linux as an option for old computers. Server-based Linux is a different matter, and I use it all the time.

 

[Ma2k5]

Thanks for this OP, I will try it out. Was contemplating creating a desktop PC but if this works well no real need for me.

Edit: Not available till October in UK

 

[PhoneI]

I currently do this to run a single Windows app that I still need.....Microsoft Project. I run it off a virtual AWS Windows 10 machine. Works great. Only limitation was using on a plane (when I still traveled).

 

[jkozlow3]

Does anyone know if the AWS Windows machines allow the use of locally connected USB peripheral devices? For example, one of the only things I use my Windows VM for these days (and very rarely at that) is for TV display calibration using a USB colorimeter and the free HCFR software (Windows only). Just wondering if a cloud VM on AWS or similar would allow me to use my USB colorimeter.

Thanks!

 

[johngwheeler]

Does anyone know if the AWS Windows machines allow the use of locally connected USB peripheral devices? For example, one of the only things I use my Windows VM for these days (and very rarely at that) is for TV display calibration using a USB colorimeter and the free HCFR software (Windows only). Just wondering if a cloud VM on AWS or similar would allow me to use my USB colorimeter.

Thanks!

This may be possible on AWS. Have a look at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dcv/latest/adminguide/manage-usb-remote.html

There are certainly various companies that provide USB passthrough (sometimes called USB-over-IP), so it's definitely "a thing".