What is AWS Outposts?

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that enables customers to bring AWS infrastructure and supported AWS Services to their Datacenters or other on-premise facilities.

Outposts is basically a packaged appliance – consisting of compute, storage, and other required components – that makes it feasible to bring certain set of AWS services onto your premises.

 

This is what an Outposts rack look like:

AWS Outposts Rack

Image courtesy of AWS

 

You follow following steps to get Outposts working in your facilities:

AWS Outposts - How it works.

Image courtesy of AWS

 

Key benefits of AWS Outposts

  • You are able to keep data and processes on premises.
  • Helps achieve low-latency processing when some of your processes and / or data must reside on premises.
  • Hybrid experience – since it’s the same set of components and AWS services, you are able to easily create hybrid architecture with some applications (or its components) moved to AWS and some kept on premises.
  • Outposts is fully managed by AWS. So even though you host this at your facility, you don’t have the overhead of most of the its maintenance.

 

Key Points

  • Outposts is a fully managed service.
    • As new versions of AWS services become available on the cloud, AWS services running locally on Outposts are upgraded automatically.
  • Outposts contains the same set of hardware components that AWS deploys at its datacenters.
    • Compute – fair number of instance-types available, including:
      • General Purpose (M5 / M5d)
      • Compute Optimized (C5 / C5d)
      • Memory Optimized (R5 / R5d)
      • Graphics Optimized (G4dn)
      • I/O optimized (I3en)
    • Storage – EBS and S3
    • Each Outposts is connected to and controlled by a specific AWS Region. The Region treats a collection of up to 16 racks at a single location as a unified capacity pool.
    • Outposts was first made available in December 2019.
    • Several AWS services are available on Outposts, including:
      • Databases – RDS (MySQL and PostgreSQL)
      • Data Analytics – EMR
      • Containers – ECS, EKS

 

Pricing

AWS Outposts are charged based on its configuration (EC2 instance types, EBS volumes, and S3).

  • You have the option to pay on monthly basis, partial upfront, or all upfront.
  • To give you a sense of pricing, the snapshot below shows sample price (in USA) of three General purpose unit configurations:

AWS Outposts Sample Pricing

 

External Resources

 

 

AWS Compute Hybrid Outposts Storage