AWS re:Invent: AWS Outposts Managed and Configurable Compute and Storage Racks Built With AWS Hardware

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon company, announced availability of AWS Outposts, managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises, while connecting to the company’s array of services in the cloud.

Outposts bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. With Outposts, customers can use the same AWS APIs, control plane, tools, and hardware on-premises as in the AWS cloud to deliver a consistent hybrid experience.

Over the past several years, the company has delivered services like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Direct Connect, and Amazon Storage Gateway to make it easier for customers who want to run their on-premises datacenters alongside AWS. In 2017, the firm collaborated with VMware, Inc. to introduce VMware Cloud on AWS, giving companies who are virtualized on VMware (which is the vast majority of enterprises) the ability to use the same on-premises VMware tools that they had been using for years to manage their infrastructure on AWS. Still, some customers have certain workloads that will likely need to remain on-premises for several years, such as applications that are latency-sensitive and need to be in close proximity to on-premises assets. Examples of these use cases include supporting manufacturing process control systems, running robotics applications in close proximity to the equipment, developing high frequency stock trading platforms, or delivering network functions virtualization (NFV) services at the telco edge. These customers want to be able to run AWS compute and storage on-premises, and also easily and seamlessly integrate these on-premises workloads with the rest of their applications in the AWS cloud. That capability has not been possible until now because solutions have lacked the same APIs, the same tools, the same hardware, and the same functionality across on-premises and the cloud to deliver a consistent hybrid experience.

Outposts solves these challenges by delivering racks of the firm’s compute and storage – the same hardware used in AWS public region datacenters – to bring AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models on-premises. With it customers can choose from a range of compute, storage, and graphics-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, both with and without local storage options, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume options.

Customers can then run a range of the company’s services locally, including EC2, EBS, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), and can connect directly to regional services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets or Amazon DynamoDB tables through private connections. Beginning in 2020, the company plans to add the ability to run more AWS services locally on Outposts, beginning with S3. The firm will deliver and install the racks to customers and handle maintenance, including automatically updating and patching infrastructure and services as part of being connected to an AWS Region, so developers and IT professionals do not have to worry about procuring or maintaining AWS Outposts.

“When we started thinking about offering a truly consistent hybrid experience, what we heard is that customers really wanted it to be the same – the same APIs, the same control plane, the same tools, the same hardware, and the same functionality. It turns out this is hard to do, and that’s the reason why existing options for on-premises solutions haven’t gotten much traction today,” said Matt Garman, VP, compute services, AWS. “With AWS Outpsts, customers can enjoy a truly consitent cloud environment using the native AWS services or VMware Cloud on AWS to operate a single enterprise IT environment across their on-premises locations and the cloud.“

Outposts comes in two variants-an AWS native variant (available), which allows customers to use the same APIs and control plane on Outposts as they use in AWS Public Regions; and VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts (planned for availability in 2020), which enables customers to use the same VMware APIs and control plane on Outposts that they’ve used to run their on-premises infrastructure for years. Outposts are an extension of a customer’s Amazon VPC in the closest AWS Region to each customer, and customers can seamlessly connect from their AWS Outposts to the rest of their applications or to any other AWS service in a Public AWS Region. To get started with Outposts, customers need to log into the AWS Management Console to order capacity, choosing from a selection of pre-validated configurations composed of a range of EC2 instances (C5, M5, R5, I3en, and G4) and EBS storage capacity options that are suited for their workloads. Once the Outposts is plugged into power and network connections, customers can view their newly activated Outpost in the Management Console and use it to launch and manage EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and AWS resources in their Amazon VPC, using the same Management Console, SDK or CLI tools as they use in AWS today.

Outposts racks fit into various customer environments with a variety of plug and play options for power and network, and comes in the standard 80-inch tall 42U dimension. It are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), EU West (Ireland), AsiaPac (Seoul, Korea), and AsiaPac (Tokyo, Japan) regions, with more regions coming soon.

Dynatrace provides software intelligence to simplify enterprise cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation.

“In many industries, customers live in a hybrid world and they need insights and answers across their on-premises and cloud environments to simplify complexity and to accelerate their digital transformation,” said Steve Pace, SVP, global sales, Dynatrace. “With the launch of AWS Outposts, organizations have a seamless hybrid experience in how they build, operate, and manage their application workloads across cloud and on-premises environments. Like AWS Outposts, the Dynatrace software intelligence platform, powered by an explainable AI engine, was purpose built to support hybrid environments in a single platform and provide the same observability, automation, and intelligence regardless of the customer’s deployment model. Dynatrace’s software intelligence platform has been vetted and tested in close collaboration with AWS, to provide a seamless and frictionless experience for our joint hybrid cloud customers.“

FanDuel Group is a sports-tech entertainment company that is changing the way consumers engage with their favorite sports, teams, and leagues.

“The FanDuel Sportsbook is America’s number one online sportsbook; available in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Indiana, as well as retail locations in Iowa and New York, with hundreds of thousands of patrons already enrolled,” said Alan Murray, senior director, architecture, FanDuel Group. “The FanDuel fantasy platform is 100% AWS cloud-native and as we expand our Sportsbook offering, it will be key for us to comply with regulatory policies by running these services in-State. With games played every day, our infrastructure must be highly available, responsive and provide a quality real-time betting experience for our customers. Our main goal in pursuing AWS Outposts is to save time on all the system administration traditionally associated with on-premises infrastructure. We want to build systems, not manage hardware – and like our Fantasy platform, we plan to offload as much of the undifferentiated heavy lifting as possible to AWS. This will liberate our DevOps team; freeing them from the burden of managing infrastructure, allowing them to focus on capabilities that get new product features to our customers quickly. Being able to leverage AWS Outposts for our Sportsbook applications will be a huge boost for us, allowing us to really focus on innovation.“

The Government of Monaco, a sovereign city-state in Southern Europe, has decided to collaborate with the company and to utilize Outposts with the aim of creating a hybrid cloud architecture in the Principality.

“The cloud will be at the cornerstone of the digitalization of Monaco’s public policies including health, education, mobility and government. It will also be a major milestone in increasing Monaco’s attractiveness towards companies and investments,” said Frédéric Genta, country chief digital officer, Principality of Monaco. “The hybrid architecture will enable both the access to a full catalogue of services and solutions while keeping Monaco data sovereignty and security as it will be based in Monaco. In today’s economy, finding the right technology, partners, and structure is a competitive advantage, we notably expect to become more responsive to population needs and will simplify the interaction between our population and the administration.“

Morningstar is a provider of independent investment research around the globe.

“Our independent data, research, and solutions empower investor success by delivering insights and experiences that are essential to investing,” said James Rhodes, CTO, Morningstar, Inc. “As we continue to modernize our data collection and software, we want to create containerized hybrid infrastructure and easily deploy using AWS services. With AWS Outposts, we can build once and run application on-premises and easily migrate our applications to an AWS Region where possible. Ultimately, this allows us to accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies within our development teams, keep up with accelerating business and customer needs, and support our long-term journey to the cloud.“

Royal Philips (Koninklijke Philips N.V) is a health technology company focused on improving people’s health and enabling better outcomes across the health continuum from healthy living and prevention, to diagnosis, treatment and home care.

“At Philips we are constantly innovating to help healthcare providers provide high quality care to their patients. We’ve architected our HealthSuite platform using AWS services. However, for some mission-critical healthcare applications we often need compute capabilities positioned close to the point-of-care. Data-residency rules also require us to handle some data processing within the healthcare facility – either entirely or as a pre-processing step before moving data to the cloud,” said Rich Ridolfo, Sr director, operations and infrastructure R&D, Philips Healthcare. “Today, we run these applications on separate infrastructure, and have to support separate development and infrastructure procurement models to deliver hybrid solutions to our customers. With AWS Outposts, we benefit from having a single set of AWS services, APIs, and management and security tools for applications running in the AWS Region and at our healthcare facilities, helping us accelerate the pace of healthcare innovation.“

Trend Micro, a provider in cybersecurity solutions, helps to make the world safe for exchanging digital information.

“We share AWS’s commitment to helping customers accelerate the delivery of applications and providing flexibility to choose how they manage hybrid environments,” said Wendy Moore, VP, product marketing, Trend Micro, Inc. “The new AWS Outposts capabilities will be a natural fit with our existing hybrid protection giving customers central visibility and enabling automation of security controls across on-premises, virtual and cloud environments.“

Vitesco Technologies, a business area of Continental AG, is an international developer and manufacturer of powertrain technologies for sustainable mobility. With smart system solutions and components for electric, hybrid and internal combustion drivetrains, Vitesco Technologies makes mobility clean, efficient and affordable.

“We’re building cloud-first with our Powertrain Cloud Foundation platform on AWS, and we are in the midst of expanding our Cloud Foundation platform to our production sites through AWS Outposts,” said Christoph Schmid, head, IT infrastructure, Vitesco Technologies. “Our high production volume and low cycle times demand very low latency to our Manufacturing Execution systems. We therefore envision running and operating our decentralized Manufacturing Execution systems on AWS Outposts as part of our work to accelerate our software development timelines. We see AWS Outposts as a fully automated option that will provide us with unprecedented transparency.“

Pricing of Outposts

Resources:
Video: AWS Outposts overview and how it works
Video: Philips: AWS Outposts Customer Testimonial     
WP: AWS Outposts: Extend the Value of Cloud Investments On-Premises     
Solution brief: AWS Outposts bring the power of Amazon Cloud on premises for the healthcare industry     
Blog: Running AWS Infrastructure On Premises with AWS Outposts 
Video: What is an AWS Outposts Rack
Gartner Report: Prepare for AWS Outposts to Disrupt Your Hybrid Cloud Strategy