Coming soon at Computle: April 2024 Development Updates

Jake Elsley

Apr 3, 2024 — 3 min read

Computle end-user device development.

I'm Jake, the founder of Computle, a remote workstation subscription for the AEC and VFX industries. In this post, I'll be walking you though the latest development updates showcasing our-end user device, our new login experience, and an update on our portal.

1) End-user device (under development)

Hardware

Continuing with our them of innovating - and not just reselling someone else's product - we are excited to confirm the development of our latest end-user device.

This solution has been four years in the making. Initially, we used off-the-shelf thin client/zero client devices, but every device we tested had performance limitations. For example, some of the devices we tried over the years would not support dual 4k resolution, and some had a closed source operating system that made it incompatible with Computle's remote access software.

Tackling the issue head on, I gathered various parts from my latest trip to China and have spent the past few months testing each component and building the ideal end-user device. So far, we have found good support for dual 4k, interoperability with our software, and significant improvements in 60fps+ frame rates.

Software

Recognising user feedback around device management, we are developing a custom software stack based on Windows IoT Enterprise. This will enable us to securely lock down the end-user device with an immutable operating system image. In addition, the device will feature BitLocker encryption, an unbranded boot experience, and a pull-based configuration management system so that each device remains isolated and off-network.

Price

We anticipate that this unit will cost around £7 per month per device.

Recognising that the login flow needs improvement, particularly for deployments to over 100 seats, we are excited to announce a new login flow that will be released in the next few months.

Rather than remembering which Computle you are assigned to, you will simply need to enter your organisation's ID and click connect. Depending on the username provided, we will then automatically route you to your assigned Computle machine. What's more, this feature does not add any latency or performance impact, as we maintain direct routing to your machine's endpoint.

3) Unified management portal (scoping phase)

After our internal migration away from VMWare, we decided to pause development of our previous Computle management portal. Recognising the need for control over the Computle machines, we are scoping the use of Windows Admin Centre to control each tenant's machines.

Special consideration is being made on how best to deliver this service given our existing isolation of management and tenant networks, and our early decision to prevent Computle machines having a shared MSP-style identity provider.

Most likely, each tenant will have their own dedicated control plane, interlinked to their existing identity provider such as Entra ID/Active Directory.