What are AWS Outposts?

AWS Outposts is the new hybrid service provided by Amazon Cloud Services.

AWS Outposts bring AWS services, infrastructure and operating models to virtually any data center, co-
location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

According to AWS website: “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 is trying to give customers consistent hybrid experience,
which is a good thing.

Now, you can use the same hardware that AWS uses in all its regions with compute and storage
software on it.
Origin Story
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 Far zones 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:

1. Native and exclusive access to additional AWS services.

2. 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

3. AWS provides a vast array of custom compute, memory and storage options to choose the best
suitable configuration for your applications.

4. Fully managed infrastructure by AWS itself.

5. Monitoring by AWS console to maintain health and performance of AWS Outpost.

AWS Outpost Variants:

AWS’s big on-prem move seeks to reduce the complexity of hybrid cloud, since customers on these
clouds will no longer have to manage disparate multi-vendor IT environments. Some additional details
were shared at the announce, including the fact that Outpost will be available in two different offerings:
VMware Cloud on AWS that runs on Outposts and AWS Outposts that allows customers to utilize the
same native APIs used in AWS. It was a tantalizing premise, but the announcement left me with many
more questions. Without further ado, let’s dissect the news.

1. 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.

2. VMware variant

It allows the user to use VMware cloud on AWS infrastructure that too on-premises using same
APIs and console.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty 

Some of my lingering questions were revolved around which EC2 instances would be supported. AWS
revealed in the blog post that AWS Outposts can be utilized to launch a number of Amazon EC2
instances:

 EC2 C5- AWS targets this instance for high-performance web servers, high-performance
computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, video
encoding, scientific modeling, distributed analytics and machine/deep learning inference.

 EC M5- AWS targets this “balanced” instance for general-purpose workloads like web and
application servers, backend servers for enterprise applications, gaming servers, caching fleets,
and app development environments.

 EC2 R5- AWS targets this instance for memory-intensive applications such as high-performance
databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches, mid-size in-memory databases, real-time
big data analytics, and other enterprise applications

 EC2 I3en- With the “lowest price per GB of SSD on EC2” AWS targets data-intensive workloads
such as relational and NoSQL databases, distributed file systems, search engines, and data
warehousing.

 EC2 G4- Using up to eight NVIDIA T4’s this EC2 instance is targeted to machine learning training
& inferencing, video transcoding, and “other demanding applications.”

 With this broad compute assortment, AWS isn’t tiptoeing into the space; it’s driving a bulldozer
through the wall into the space.

 These can be configured with and without local storage. Additionally, AWS announced that
Outposts can launch Amazon EBS volumes locally.

 When originally announced, AWS said that Outposts would have “the same breadth and depth
of features” as AWS cloud. Given that could number somewhere in the thousands, I was
skeptical of the claim and curious about just what services would be supported by Outposts.
AWS shed some light on this in the blog and revealed a number of services it says will be locally
supported on AWS Outposts at the time of launch. These Amazon-branded services will include:
  Amazon EKS (elastic K8 services) and ECS (elastic container services) clusters for container-based
apps

 Amazon RDS instances for relational databases. This is bad news for Oracle as many customers
have been waiting for the hybrid RDS capability to replace Oracle.

 Amazon EMR (elastic map reduce) clusters for data analytics

 Amazon SageMaker, AWS’s end to end solution to build, train and deploy ML will be introduced
“soon”

 Amazon MSK, AWS’s fully managed Apache Kafka as a service for real-time streaming data apps,
will be introduced “soon”

The blog also provided some helpful clarification on what sort of workloads Outposts is geared towards,
versus its Snowball Edge offering, another hybrid offering designed to integrate on-prem resources with
AWS.

While Snowball Edge is designed for environments with little to no connectivity (think cruise ships or
remote mining locations), Outposts is geared towards on-prem, connected environments. The potential
for Outpost deployments span across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, media and
entertainment, telecom, and more. These verticals often require compute-intensive, graphics-intensive,
storage-intensive applications, which stand to benefit from the ultra-low latency (single-digit
millisecond) promised by AWS Outposts. 

Another potential benefit of Outposts is that they are updated and patched alongside AWS regional
operations—which means there’s no need to upgrade and patch on-prem infrastructure, and no
downtime for maintenance.

Real-life Outposts customer use case 

To better illustrate the potential of Outposts, AWS also shared an unnamed early customer’s success
story with the offering in an industrial setting.

The customer was already utilizing AWS to run centralized decision-making applications—essentially

to determine what work needs to be executed at which site. After deploying an Outpost rack at one of
its sites, and connecting the rack to its nearest AWS region, the customer had total jurisdiction over its
virtual network. According to AWS, it was then able to select its IP address range, create subnets,
configure route tables and network gateways, and more, just as it did with its Amazon VPC.

Additionally, by creating a subnet and associating it with the Outpost, it was able to extend its regional
VPC to Outpost. The customer launches instances on Outpost utilizing the same API call as it does in the
public region, which can run in its pre-existing VPC and communicate with public region instances using
private IP addresses. AWS claims that applications running on these instances will perform identically as
they do in the public region, given the hardware is the same as what is used in their public region
datacenters. The customer can also create a local gateway within the VPC that allows Outpost to direct
traffic to its local datacenter networks. According to AWS, the customer intends to utilize Outposts to
standardize tooling across on-prem and the cloud and automate deployments and configurations across
its many facilities.

This is exactly how I had envisioned enterprises using Outposts and it's super-exciting.

Wrapping up 

This isn’t AWS’s first hybrid rodeo as it has many different hybrid methods like the Snowball family,
Direct Connect, Route 53, Storage Gateway, AWS Backup, DataSync, Transfer for SFTP, Directory
Services, IAM, OpsWork, CodeDeploy, Systems Manager, and Greengrass. I believe Outposts raises the
offering monumentally. Outposts is big compute, memory and storage on-prem, managed via AWS.

Cloud vendors have invested huge amounts to meet the customer requirements for hybrid cloud
experience. But most importantly hybrid cloud adoption will be easier through AWS Outposts.
Source: 1.AWS FAQ .

2.Various Online blogs

3.Articles related to this topic.