As a software engineer that works across multiple platforms, I've used Amazon Workspaces as my primary Windows dev environment for the past 18 months. In general the experience is great- the input response and 2D graphics are superior to an RDP session. It's easy to forget you're working remotely. Another nice bonus is longer battery life relative to running a virtual machine on your laptop.

But the real limitation is the tiny C: partition. It's fixed at 60 GB, nearly half of which consumed by Windows and its gradual updates, which generally leaves you with insufficient space to install Visual Studio with the Xamarin tools.

The limitation has been noted in the AWS Developer forums, but unfortunately the 60 GB limitation seems hard-wired into the platform for now[1]. It's painful enough that I searched around for alternatives, but I couldn't find any direct competitors! I'd be 100% happy with this if I didn't have to run up against this 60 GB limit all the time. Just a heads-up for any engineers considering this for a Windows development environment.

[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=220618