Amazon Web Services (AWS) looks to extend beyond the public cloud to on-premises datacentre hardware with AWS Outposts-- an initiative in AWS-designed fully managed and configured compute and storage racks.
“Customers are telling us that they don’t want a hybrid experience that attempts to recreate a stunted version of a cloud on-premises, because it’s perpetually out of sync with the cloud version and requires a lot of heavy lifting, managing custom hardware, different control planes, different tooling, and manual software updates,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy says. “There just isn’t a lot of value in that type of on-premises offering and that’s why these solutions aren’t getting much traction.”
Outposts is technically a take on hybrid cloud, since it aimes to offer customers on-premises systems acting as an extension of the AWS or VMware cloud in AWS. As such, Outposts hardware offers the same hardware, APIs and interfaces powering AWS cloud services, such as Amazon S3, Glacier and Elastic Block Store (EBS), only in on-premises form.
AWS Outposts come in 2 flavours-- one for customers wanting the same APIs and control plane as AWS, the other for customers wanting to run VMware on AWS locally. The AWS offering includes an integrated VMware product called VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2, with technologies such as NSX for network virtualisation and AppDefence able to work across both VMware and Amazon EC2 environments.
Meanwhile the self-descriptive VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts allows customers to run the entire VMware software-defined-datacentre (SDDC) on-premises. It includes the same VMware control plane and APIs, and offers the same compute, storage and networking capabilities as VMware Cloud on AWS.
In both cases, AWS delivers the racks to customers, installs them and handles all maintenance and replacement of racks. The Outposts program is currently private preview, and will be generally available from H2 2019.
Go AWS Outposts
