One of the key customer requests of AWS over the years was to support a fully managed infrastructure solution that can integrate cloud based services on premises. In this long overdue blogpost we will introduce AWS Outposts. Outposts is a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience.
With AWS Outposts, customers run (which are “not easy to migrate to the cloud”) applications and workloads in their data center which leverage AWS services while connecting to the local AWS Region. Outposts is a managed solution that enables ease of use (same AWS tools and APIs), flexibility and the need to enable a global footprint. The term ‘Outpost’ is a logical construct that denotes a pool of capacity from one or more racks of servers. It also includes a gateway that communicates from on prem to the AWS region.
AWS Outposts – AWS in your Datacenter
AWS Outposts first went generally available in Dec 2019. An Outpost is a pool of AWS compute and storage capacity deployed at a customer site. AWS operates, monitors, and manages this capacity as part of an AWS Region. You can create subnets on your Outpost and specify them when you create AWS resources such as EC2 instances, EBS volumes, ECS clusters, and RDS instances. Instances in Outpost subnets communicate with other instances in the AWS Region using private IP addresses, all within the same VPC.
There are three main use cases where customers will deploy Outposts, Outposts support workloads and devices requiring low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and application migration with local system interdependencies. –
- Customers need to run applications that need low latency access to data or processing that needs to happen on-premise. Examples include Telco 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) and such Edge workloads as highlighted in previous blogs – https://www.vamsitalkstech.com/cloud/edge-computing-challenges-and-opportunities-featured-on-techtarget/
- Workloads that need to comply with data residency regulations – Most countries have data residency rules where national citizen information cannot either be put in the cloud or leave the premises where it was recorded. Outposts is suited for these
- Workloads that require consistency of infrastructure operations – Given that each Outpost capacity pool (a collection of upto 16 racks that behaves as a subnet of the VPCs running in the Region) is connected to and controlled by a given AWS Region, customers get the same APIs, tools, and operational practices. For instance, developers can create and use the same deployment pipeline to develop and deploy applications into both Outposts and your cloud-based environments. This enables the creation of hybrid architectures that go from the Cloud to on premises.
So What does the Outposts Infrastructure Look Like
AWS Outposts rack is an industry standard 42U form factor. It provides the same AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter or co-location space. Outposts rack provides AWS compute, storage, database, and other services locally, while still allowing you to access the full range of AWS services available in the Region for a truly consistent hybrid experience. Scale from a single 42U rack to multiple rack deployments of up to 96 racks to create pools of compute and storage capacity. The servers themselves are now available in different form factors – 2U and 1U.
Outposts servers, leverage the AWS Nitro System and provide customers with a choice of x86 or Arm/Graviton2 processors. Here’s an overview:
In 2021, AWS announced that Outposts solutions will now be available in a variety of form factors, from 1U and 2U Outposts servers to 42U Outposts racks, and multiple rack deployments.