In this video, Mike Duncan shows how you can leverage Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure in your FileMaker deployments by using Amazon AppStream 2.0.
Video Transcript:
Hello, this is Mike Duncan of Soliant Consulting. This video is a follow-up to my session at FileMaker DevCon where we I shared an example of how you can leverage AWS’s infrastructure in your FileMaker deployments.
AppStream 2.0 is an AWS service that provides users with dynamically provision virtual machines to connect to, using nothing but an HTML5 web browser. You’re able to publish only the applications that your users will need and not have to see the entire desktop. Let’s log in to try it out.
We log in and see that when we connect, it’s building up an instance and connecting us to it. I’ve got the File Maker application installed, but I’ve also got an alias just directly for our particular solution.
By the way, this is launching to an AWS hosted FileMaker server, so the latency is very low. You can see that we get the whole full desktop application served to us. Pop-ups work nicely. Let’s see how photos look. This is all, again, just using a web browser. We have multiple windows that we can use.
Another interesting thing is how printing works. Printing can be kind of an issue with remote desktop sessions, but AppStream solves this issue for us. We’re just going to click on the Print button, and we can see that we’ve got an Amazon print driver. When we print, it’s going to feed us whatever we printed as a PDF and from here we can save it and print it.
This is just to demonstrate some of what’s possible when utilizing AWS services, which can be an important factor when planning File Maker deployment. Again, we showed this at DevCon. We think it’s one of the more exciting possibilities for delivering your solutions.
As always, reach out to us for more information or with questions. Thanks, this has been Mike Duncan with Soliant Consulting.
Hi Mike, I have a client that is looking at AppStream. Is this still a viable option and if so, does it act similarly to a remote desktop session? We need to move images in and out of FileMaker using shared drives. Thank you Bonnie
Hi Bonnie,
AppStream is similar to remote desktop, but runs in a web browser and is probably more analogous to a citrix farm. I might also recommend another AWS service called Workspaces, which can cost less than AppStream and be a little easier to configure, especially if only occasional use is needed.