AWS offers to put its infrastructure in your data centre

Prepares to GA ‘AWS Outposts’ next year

Amazon Web Services has launched a private preview of ‘AWS Outposts’: A new offering that involves the deployment of AWS-designed hardware within a customer’s own data centre.

EC2 and EBS will be able to run on-premises, and AWS said it planned to add support for RDS, ECS, EKS, SageMaker and EMR at launch or “in the months after”.

AWS said the service would be ideal for workloads that have low-latency requirements or involved data that needed to be processed locally. Examples the cloud provider offered included telecommunications virtual network functions (VNFs), processing and editing live video streams, high frequency trading platforms, industrial automation, and legacy enterprise applications that depend on local databases.

AWS said that as part of the new service it would deliver the racks and, if the customers want, install them, as well as deal with maintenance and any replacements when necessary.

The announcement follows the 2017 launch of VMware Cloud on AWS, which AWS said would help its customers operate a “consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment”.

The outposts act as an extension of a customer’s Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, AWS said.

“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 chief executive Andy Jassy said.

“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.”

The AWS CEO said that the company’s customers wanted “an extension of their AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS environment on-premises, using the same hardware we’re using, the same interfaces, the same APIs, the same instant access to the latest AWS capabilities the minute they become available, and they don’t want to manage hardware or software.”

The company is launching two varieties. One is VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, allowing the infrastructure to be managed form the same console as VMware Cloud on AWS. The other uses the AWS control plane and APIs. 

The company said that a public launch of AWS Outposts is expected in the second half of 2019.

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Tags cloud computingAmazon Web Services (AWS)

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