Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution which runs on AWS. With Amazon WorkSpaces, you can easily provision virtual, cloud-based Microsoft Windows desktops for your users, providing them access to the documents, applications, and resources they need, anywhere, anytime, from any supported device. Amazon WorkSpaces offers the flexibility to pay hourly or monthly without any up-front commitment.

To help customers with unpredictable WorkSpace usage patterns monitor their Amazon WorkSpaces usage and optimize costs, AWS offers the Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer, a solution that analyzes all of your WorkSpace usage data and automatically converts the WorkSpace to the most cost-effective billing option (hourly or monthly) depending on the user's individual usage. This solution is easy to deploy and uses AWS CloudFormation to automatically provision and configure the necessary AWS services.

The following section assumes basic knowledge of architecting on the AWS Cloud, virtual desktops and Amazon WorkSpaces.

