Microsoft has retired Azure remote app service and they have announce it on 12th Augusts of 2016. I know it’s not a good news to all the Azure RemoteApp service users. In fact I was started enjoying this service and providing solutions to my customers as well.Reasons for this retirement in their words are follows.
“Based on customer feedback and market dynamics, we adjusted our strategy to focus more on the cloud platform that underpins finished desktop and application virtualization services. Because of this, we’re expanding our relationships with partners who build out those full solutions, most notably Citrix. Citrix is our long standing partner in this space, and we recently expanded our relationship together to address these and new scenarios for joint customers using the Azure cloud.”
Now what will happen after a year? Existing Azure RemoteApp users have alternatives to move to Citrix XenApp or any other hosted solution such as Remote Desktop Services deployed on Azure IaaS. But its look like Microsoft favor to move them to Citrix XenApp. Microsoft blog post describe it as follows.
“Customers have provided us consistent feedback that they want a comprehensive, end-to-end, cloud-based solution for delivering Windows apps. The best way for us to deliver this is with Citrix through XenApp "express", currently under development. XenApp "express" combines the simplicity of application remoting and the scalability of Azure with the security, management, and performance benefits of XenApp, to deliver Windows applications to any employee on any device. We will have much more to share on this offering through the coming months”.
Also Microsoft stated that they will ensure a smooth transmission of existing customers to the new platform. But what is the Citrix XenApp, we all know Citrix is far better in remote desktop solutions than Microsoft. It’s much faster, reliable and have many more features. But it’s not cheap. That’s the main reason people tend to move to Azure RemoteApp. So we don’t know the cost of Citrix XenApp, is there any additional cost or same price as the Azure RemoteApp. Those are yet to come public
Citrix has announced, they will release the technical preview on Q4 of 2016 and general availability in early 2017. So we have to wait till then to test this.
RIP Azure Remote App
Asitha De Silva
References
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2016/08/12/application-remoting-and-the-cloud/?WT.mc_id=azurebg_email_Trans_1164_Azure_RemoteApp_Sunset
https://www.citrix.com/global-partners/microsoft/remote-app.html
