Introduction
The last blog introduced Outposts as the same AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools for customer on-premises and edge locations that have limited space or smaller capacity requirements, such as retail stores, branch offices, healthcare provider locations, or factory floors. Outposts servers provide local compute and networking services.
Key concepts (source: AWS docs)
These are the key concepts for AWS Outposts.
- Outpost site – The customer-managed physical buildings where AWS will install your Outpost. A site must meet the facility, networking, and power requirements for your Outpost.
- Outpost configurations – Configurations of Amazon EC2 compute capacity, Amazon EBS storage capacity, and networking support. Each configuration has unique power, cooling, and weight support requirements.
- Outpost capacity – Compute and storage resources available on the Outpost. You can view and manage the capacity for your Outpost from the AWS Outposts console.
- Outpost equipment – Physical hardware that provides access to the AWS Outposts service. The hardware includes racks, servers, switches, and cabling owned and managed by AWS.
- Outpost racks – An Outpost form factor that is an industry-standard 42U rack. Outpost racks include rack-mountable servers, switches, a network patch panel, a power shelf, and blank panels.
- Outpost servers – An Outpost form factor that is an industry-standard 1U or 2U server, which can be installed in a standard EIA-310D 19 compliant 4 post rack. Outpost servers provide local compute and networking services to sites that have limited space or smaller capacity requirements.
- Service link – Network route that enables the communication between your Outpost and its associated AWS Region. Each Outpost is an extension of an Availability Zone and its associated Region.
- Local gateway – A logical interconnect virtual router that enables the communication between an Outpost rack and your on-premises network.
- Local network interface – A network interface that enables communication from an Outpost server and your on-premises network.
The Outposts server can directly be launched from the AWS management console as shown below. Once the user selects the type of instance, it gets launched as long as you stay within the overall commute and storage capacity available to you. Application services such as EKS, ECS etc can also then be launched to deploy applications on top of. The Outposts server also provides L2 network connectivity to other instances in your data center as well as providing an endpoint for access. The security aspects of Outposts are provided by the AWS Nutro system. Servers are locked down to prevent unauthorized administrative access and tampering. Data at rest is protected by a NIST-compliant physical security key.
Conclusion
We will make extensive use of Outposts deployments when we discuss 5G network architectures in follow-up blogs in 2022.