News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Vagon – Personal high performance computer in the cloud by aroch on Thursday March 19, 2020 @12:41PM (#22629175)
At work, we use Paperspace quite a bit for Desktop-as-a-Service in order to teach distance learning and in-person classes. We like not having to rely on our users having beefy(ish) laptops or being able to install software on them. The killer paperspace features for us, in no particular order, are:

1. Private networks -> keep classes isolated 2. Shared drives -> mount read-only class data 3. Create machine images -> build out the 'base' class image and spawn new instances from it 4. An API for spinning up and down

It seems like you are positioning yourselves as more for individuals and less for companies. It's not clear fo me from the landing page, but does Vagon require you download and install a client? Or is there a browser-only option? If we were to spin up, say 35 VMs, and then destroyed them a week later, is that $7.99/month charged for each machine or just once? Is it pro-rated if you don't use the whole month?

Re:Vagon – Personal high performance computer in the cloud by nizmow on Thursday March 19, 2020 @12:46PM (#22629230)
How do you remote into Paperspace instances? Is there a custom client that performs well? Every few months I'll tinker with setting up a Linux desktop in some generic cloud provider, but the lack of good remote desktop X solutions is always a pain point.

EDIT: after some more clicking around I managed to find references to a Paperspace "native app" for remote desktop. I may sign up for an account and give it a try, since I just noticed Vagon only supports Windows machines at the moment.

Re:Vagon – Personal high performance computer in the cloud by aroch on Thursday March 19, 2020 @02:58PM (#22630494)
We generally use the browser interface, since many of our classes have both a GUI app and commandline work -- we've done this with both the Windows VMs and the linux ones. For linux desktop (Ubuntu), we use the ML-in-a-box image as our base and build on top of that. The linux VMs you can also SSH in via your favorite terminal/client
Re:Vagon – Personal high performance computer in the cloud by hasancanyasar on Thursday March 19, 2020 @12:58PM (#22629338)
You are correct to assume we position ourselves to serve individuals. Because of this if you spin up 35 workstations, that would unfortunately mean 35 different subscriptions for storage. And yes currently the subscription price is pro-rated for the whole month.

Currently we only have the browser only client to connect to your workstation with native clients in development.

This being our beta launch, obviously we've a lot to learn and adapt about our customers so your feedback has been very useful.