AWS Outposts
AWS Outposts is an on-premises IT as a service (ITaaS) platform from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Outposts, which acts as a hybrid cloud, allows users to host an environment similar to a public cloud on premises. According to Amazon, Outposts will be released in the second half of 2019.
Typical hybrid cloud platforms need users to operate multiple IT environments with multiple vendors to maintain hardware, software, updates and management tools along with other infrastructure. AWS Outposts coordinates everything under one environment, similar to what a user would have in other AWS services to ease management. With Outposts, users can use the same APIs, tools and hardware used on premises or in the cloud. Outposts will use configurable and fully managed storage racks made with AWS hardware.
As of this writing, users can provision EC2 and EBS instances and volumes on Outposts. AWS plans to add support for services such as RDS, ECS, EMR, EKS and SageMaker at a later time. Outposts also features a management console so users can monitor system health and performance, along with automatic updates to maintain infrastructure management software.
How to use AWS Outposts
Users will be able to choose between two variants of Outposts, VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and AWS native. VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts will let users utilize VMware control planes and APIs, while AWS native will let users utilize AWS APIs they may already run in the cloud, on premises.
To run Outposts, users will require physical space, power and a network to deploy Outpost hardware on premise. Users then can securely connect to an AWS Availability Zone over a VPN or AWS Direct Connect. Once everything is set up, users can log into the AWS Management Console, and configure and order their Outposts service. Users can choose EC2 instances and storage options. AWS will ship Outposts to the user, where they can then hook the service up, and view Outposts in the AWS Management Console. Users will then be able to launch their applications as part of the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Users can start with one Outpost server and scale them as needed.
Benefits of AWS Outposts
Potential benefits to using AWS Outposts include:
- Is fully managed by AWS and can be monitored for system health and performance.
- Can automatically update and execute software patches.
- Users can deploy their application into AWS cloud on-premise without needing to re-write any code.
- Allows users to choose between VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and AWS native variants.
- Allows users to choose compute, memory and storage options.
