EUCOPS09-BP02 Allocate training time so your teams can build and maintain their skills to deploy and manage your AWS EUC environment - End User Computing (EUC) Lens
Implementation guidance

EUCOPS09-BP02 Allocate training time so your teams can build and maintain their skills to deploy and manage your AWS EUC environment

Training and enablement are key to maintaining a reliable, successfully-evolving EUC deployment.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High

Implementation guidance

Provide targeted training on the AWS Cloud, Amazon WorkSpaces, and WorkSpaces Applications to verify that architects, administrators, and support personnel all have the relevant skills to design, deploy, and maintain the AWS EUC environment. Give this training through authorized training courses and professional accreditations and create a training environment that can be used for evaluation and self-instruction, augmenting official coursework.

The core tenets are the same for WorkSpaces and WorkSpaces Applications as they are for delivering a remotely accessed, centralized, and virtualized desktop and application delivery service, either on-premises or from an alternate cloud vendor. Skills in these areas are transferrable to deploying and managing AWS EUC services. It is essential for your deployment teams to have a good understanding of compute, networking, storage, virtualization, and application delivery, at a minimum.

Technical teams may need to be prepared in different ways depending on the nature of the adoption of Amazon WorkSpaces and WorkSpaces Applications services:

Greenfield a net new deployment with no prior cloud or EUC skills

Teams need to be trained, and they should iteratively maintain their skills in AWS core competencies such as cloud delivery, compute, networking, and storage, in addition to specific training and exposure to Amazon WorkSpaces and WorkSpaces Applications. Focus on understanding the core tenets of cloud delivery such as reducing costs, increasing scalability and resilience, and taking advantage of the global reach of AWS Cloud services. This may be an area where AWS Professional Services or an AWS Partner may be able to add significant value until your technical teams are familiar with the technologies involved.

A net new deployment with existing EUC skills, but no prior cloud infrastructure skills

Teams need to be trained, and they should iteratively maintain their skills in AWS core competencies such as cloud delivery, compute, networking, and storage. Focus on understanding the core tenets of cloud delivery such as reducing costs, increasing scalability and resilience, and taking advantage of the global reach of AWS Cloud services.

Teams should still be trained on and exposed to Amazon WorkSpaces and WorkSpaces Applications, but technical teams with prior experience deploying and managing EUC solutions will find this relatively straightforward.

Migration from an on-premises deployment of an existing vendors EUC solution

Teams need to be trained, and they should iteratively maintain their skills in AWS core competencies such as cloud delivery, compute, networking, and storage. Focus on understanding the core tenets of cloud delivery such as reducing costs, increasing scalability and resilience, and taking advantage of the global reach of AWS Cloud services.

Teams should still be trained on and exposed to Amazon WorkSpaces and WorkSpaces Applications, but technical teams with prior experience deploying and managing EUC solutions will find this relatively straightforward.

Pay particular attention on the training and preparation needed to accommodate the differences between the incumbent solution and the way AWS EUC services are deployed and managed. Differences in image lifecycle management, application delivery, user access and peripheral support will be key.

Migration from an existing cloud or hybrid deployment of EUC services

Technical teams with existing expertise deploying cloud solutions from other vendors will have transferrable skills that shortcut training requirements. While AWS Cloud and EUC service training will still be required, the time to absorb and apply this knowledge will require less time and effort.

Pay particular attention on the training and preparation needed to accommodate the differences between the incumbent cloud and EUC solutions and the way AWS Cloud and EUC services are deployed and managed.

While Amazon WorkSpaces and WorkSpaces Applications deliver standard Windows desktops and applications, which are created, managed, and maintained in a similar way to many other EUC and VDI systems, there are a few specific differences that need to be considered:-

Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon WorkSpaces Applications service specifics

Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon WorkSpaces Applications are fully managed services, meaning that there is no customer access to the control plane. While this reduces control plane hardware requirements and simplifies deployment, there are some specific differences that need to be considered:

  • Connectivity: User connectivity to each of the services is typically through an AWS-controlled point of presence on the public internet. Both streaming authentication and streaming traffic are delivered in this fashion. For Amazon WorkSpaces Applications, streaming traffic can be routed to a customer-configured VPC endpoint.

  • Compute instances: Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon WorkSpaces Applications instances are a specifically engineered version of equivalent EC2 instances. As a result, the storage and networking configuration is subtly different.

  • Instance availability: Customers already familiar with the AWS Cloud and Amazon EC2 may be accustomed to a large selection of available instance types. While Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon WorkSpaces Applications offer a range of compute instances to deliver most typical EUC use cases, these are only a subset of the instance types available on EC2.

  • Cost management: Minimizing cost is a key consideration for most customers when adopting AWS EUC services. All personnel involved in deploying, managing, and maintaining the environment need to adopt a mindset that active resources add to the solution costs. For example, optimizing the running mode of WorkSpaces (Always-On or AutoStop), and managing the scale up and down policies and running mode for WorkSpaces Applications (Always-On or On-Demand) verifies that you are managing costs effectively.

Both WorkSpaces and WorkSpaces Applications have cost optimizers that can be used to reduce costs by automating the shutdown or running mode of compute resources:

Amazon WorkSpaces and WorkSpaces Applications targeted training

While a basic knowledge of AWS services, such as deploying VPCs, subnets, networking, and storage, is required to deploy AWS EUC services, the following training, specific to AWS EUC services, is also available: