Having been to the Google equivalent a few weeks ago, I went to the 2014 AWS Summit in London today. Around 2,000 of us managed to steer around the RMT tube strike and overall, very impressed.

AWS have a “Windows Desktop as a Service” offering arriving real soon now, giving you both a Windows Server 2008 R2 server plus client software (for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android) for circa $30/month/user. That increases to between $50-$70/user/month with Windows and Office in place. I can see major opportunities for them at that pricing, not least as they appear to have solved the issues around high performance graphics being driven remotely, and have also got things like keypads available on the tablet implementations of the client. You can side load apps into the mix either directly or using Active Directory.

So, I will shortly have the ability to run up a PC and do a 30 trial of the current Windows-only Tableau Desktop Professional for around £20 – so I can at last finish off the story telling end piece of my 12 year long weight/nutrition analysis, without having to buy a Windows PC. Just need to be able to through trend lines through a few different filtered scatter plots now (something I couldn’t do with Google Fusion Tables).

There are also several traditional Licensed Software providers offering server implementations of their product as instances you only pay for when active, and with no long term commits. Jaspersoft and Tableau Server being two such examples (there are many more). Amazon are also offering assistance to other software providers to provide more products under this basis, including helping to drive free 30 day trials.

Much else to be very impressed by, and the differences between themselves, Digital Ocean and Google Cloud Services are fairly stand-out – to me at least. I think i’d know what i’d do to fire up Enterprise volumes for either of AWS or Google, but the things i’d do are very different based on what i’ve now learnt.

The most populous stand appears to be that of Splunk, who were one of my 3-4 “bets for the future” when I was at Computacenter. Talking to them, it now looks like IT Security is now their biggest application area, followed by e-commerce infrastructure flows and lastly by their traditional log file (and associated performance) analysis business. The product now appears to have plugins for virtually piece of data centre, storage and network device vendor log file, and relationships in place with all the key large brand vendors – and of course links into AWS infrastructure as well now.

I didn’t win a Kindle HDX, or the iPhone 5S Telecity were raffling, nor either of the two drones. But learnt a lot, and will be applying the learnings over the next few weeks.