“Hybrid cloud is real.” It is increasing at a rapid rate. AWS is continuously molding new innovative ideas into services and AWS Outposts is clearly one of them. Amazon Outposts was announced in AWS re:Invent 2018. Cloud community was eagerly waiting for this service to be announced.
And here is all you need to know about AWS Outpost:
What are AWS Outposts?
As per AWS’ documentation, “AWS Outposts are fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that you can use to operate a seamless hybrid cloud.”
In the past few years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) have introduced several products like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or AWS Direct Connect. AWS came up with such products to ease customers to run their on-premises data centers alongside AWS. But without any doubt, AWS Outpost is the first data center product in a true manner. AWS trying to give customers consistent hybrid experience, which is a good thing. We mentioned Hybrid Cloud Adoption as one of the “Top 5 Cloud Trends in 2019”.
Now, you can use the same hardware that AWS uses in all of its regions with compute and storage software on it.
Origin Story
AWS never ignore what their customers want. Customers still have a problem that what about the workloads that are going to be live on-premises for a longer period. Customers demanded these workloads to run and interact smoothly with other AWS cloud services.
So, AWS tried to come up with a solution and thought of Farzones to provide infrastructure deployed at far away outposts.
With the all the brainstorming, AWS full-proofed an idea. This idea came in the picture when earlier in 2018, AWS was working with a single customer trying to get on-premises compute and storage.
Features of AWS Outposts:
- Native and exclusive access to additional AWS services.
- Single programming interface
- Use same programming interface, APIs or CLI for your on-premises applications and AWS cloud
- Maintain single code base and complement with same deployment tools that for AWS cloud and on-premises
- AWS provides a vast array of custom compute, memory and storage options to choose the best suitable configuration for your applications.
- Fully managed infrastructure by AWS itself
- Monitoring by AWS console to maintain health and performance of AWS Outpost
AWS Outpost Variants:
- AWS native variant
It allows you to use same APIs and same console for AWS cloud and on-premises. You can use Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS on Outposts. In upcoming months, AWS will also add on RDS, ECS, SageMaker.
- VMware variant
It allows the user to use VMware cloud on AWS infrastructure that too on-premises using same APIs and console.
How does AWS Outposts work?
AWS has not provided a clear picture
AWS is coming and proving itself as a giant in the industry by providing on-premises infrastructure. Customers who direly need their workloads to be running on-premises providing them the ownership. The enterprises still have a perception that there should be physical ownership of resources. AWS Outpost solves this problem.
But still, after the announcement, potential customers are not sure or do not have early insight about the pricing of AWS Outposts services. Also, there is not any confirmation regarding how early they can provide the required services for AWS Outposts.
So, we must wait for further announcements and updates. But you don’t have to wait to read about other key announcements of AWS reInvent 2018. Read here.
Pricing
Amazon allows you can select from several Outpost configurations, each with a combination of EC2 instance types and EBS volumes. The pricing of these configurations includes the EC2 instances and EBS volumes, plus delivery, deployment, and maintenance of the Outpost equipment. You are also allowed to increase your compute and storage volume over time by upgrading your configuration.
You have to purchase the configuration for a 3-year term and can select from three payment options similar to reserved instances: All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront. If you go with the Partial or No Upfront option, monthly charges will be applied. Any upfront charges occur 24 hours after the Outpost is deployed, and the compute and storage volume is ready for use.
Conclusion
AWS Outposts has appeared before us and we covered everything there is about it. Cloud vendors have invested huge amounts to meet the customer requirements for hybrid cloud experience. They are going to make a fortune out of it. But most importantly hybrid cloud adoption will be easier through AWS Outposts.