AWS Marketplace now offers desktop apps for Amazon WorkSpaces

Public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services today announced an interesting enhancement to its AWS Marketplace. It’s now possible to buy subscriptions for full desktop apps that you or people inside your organization can use through the Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktop service.

Historically, the AWS Marketplace has been a destination for open source software and services for installation on top of raw cloud computing resources like AWS’ EC2 virtual machine (VM) instances.

AWS recently started letting organizations offer application programming interfaces (APIs) managed through its Amazon API Gateway inside of the AWS Marketplace. Now AWS is going even further.

“AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps enables customers to discover and subscribe to Microsoft Windows-based applications using the familiar AWS Marketplace website, without having to first log in to the Amazon WorkSpaces console,” AWS said in a blog post.

The new section of the AWS Marketplace is live now, with apps ranging from Microsoft Project Professional 2013 to WinZip. Open source apps like Atom and Notepad++ are also available.

Microsoft itself has been in the process of integrating Citrix virtual desktop software into its Azure public cloud. The Google public cloud does not currently offer a virtual desktop service.