AWS (Amazon Web Services) has just announced that its S3 (Simple Storage Service) APIs can be used on AWS Outposts. Earlier, the Outposts users could only retrieve, store, or access data in regular AWS regions.
AWS Outposts is the fully-managed hybrid service that the Seattle-based cloud giant had announced at its re:Invent event in December 2019. AWS defines Outposts as “fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that you can use to operate a seamless hybrid cloud.” Outposts users get native AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS deployments right at their own data-centers.
Read More: AWS Outposts: All You Need To Know
Outposts allows users to run services in their own local environments using the configurable compute and storage racks built by AWS. Users can run services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) locally. AWS also maintains, monitors, and manages these deployments.
Coming back to the announcement, so far, the Outposts could access Amazon S3 only in AWS Regions. However, now the users can use S3 APIs to store data on AWS Outposts and process it locally. So far, the applications, tools, scripts etc. that use Amazon S3 could store data only in AWS regions, but now they can be configured to store the data locally on Outposts hardware. Further, AWS Outposts workloads can also store their data locally instead of storing it on AWS Regions.
Read More: Is Amazon RDS Availability On Outposts An Ideal Step Towards Hybrid Cloud?
Amazon made the announcement via a blog post, and stated, “speaking of keeping your data local, any objects and the associated metadata and tags are always stored on the Outpost and are never sent or stored elsewhere. However, it is essential to remember that if you have data residency requirements, you may need to put some guardrails in place to ensure no one has the permissions to copy objects manually from your Outposts to an AWS Region.”
Outposts users can add 48 TB or 96 TB of S3 storage capacity and create up to 100 buckets on each Outpost when configuring the deployment. The users with existing Outposts can use the Outposts Console to add capacity. All stored data will be encrypted using SSE-S3 and users can also go for additional server-side encryption using their own encryption keys.
Lastly, keeping data closer to applications can boost performance and reduce overall latency as filtering, compression, or other pre-processing can take place locally instead of AWS Regions. Storing data locally can also reduce data transfer needs at the user’s end. Interested users can visit this link to get started with using Amazon S3 on their Outposts deployments, and visit here for pricing details.
Read More: AWS S3 cost by family – Gain complete visibility into your cloud resources