Workspace as a Service: An Online Working Environment for Private Cloud

With the rapid development of cloud computing, more and more organizations are building their own private cloud and providing IaaS services to their internal users. However, current IaaS usually only gives users low-level resources such as virtual machines (VMs) and storages. Users have to manually setup necessary software stacks on one or even more VMs to meet their needs. This setup process is often complex and difficult for inexperienced users, who most of the time do not care about the underlying infrastructure, but only demand a working environment to do their jobs. In this paper, we introduce a new service model called WaaS (Workspace as a Service), which provides users with an online workspace having the customized software stacks, configurations and computing resources readily available. Users can directly do their various jobs in their cloud workspaces via a browser. WaaS has been implemented in an open source project Docklet. The design, real use cases and evaluations are presented.