AWS Services in your On-Premise Data Center! It's possible with AWS OutPosts.

Amazon announced AWS Outposts to run AWS infrastructure and services on-premise data centers.

AWS Outposts will equip customers with a fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware. It will also equip customers with the ability to run computer and storage on-premises data centers. At the same time, AWS Outposts will allow seamless connectivity to the rest of AWS’s services in the cloud.

It should be noted that AWS is already enabling customers with their services such as Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Direct Connect, and Amazon Storage Gateway to run in their own datacenters along with AWS. Thus enabling organizations with their hybrid cloud strategies involving AWS.

The Competition

Before exploring more on AWS OutPost, here are the few existing offerings from other Big Cloud players in the same space

• In last August 2017, VMware has announced about the availability of its cloud offering on AWS. This partnership allowed existing customers using VMware tools and technologies in their data centers to leverage proven AWS infrastructure and services.  
• At the same time around in July 2017, Microsoft announced their hybrid cloud solution, Azure Stack product with Microsoft hardware partners HPE, Dell EMC, and Lenovo. It allowed companies to run Azure instance on their premises as an extension of Microsoft Azure Cloud services.
• In August 2017 only, Google and Nutanix also announced a partnership with similar types of capabilities.
• Oracle also offers Oracle Cloud at Customer (https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cloud-at-customer.html)

All these solutions are trying to solve one common problem, to enable and help customers with their hybrid cloud strategy. Also, address specific applications that demand ultra-low latency and have to be in the on-premise data centers.

AWS Outposts is also trying to solve these challenges. As a part of AWS OutPosts, Amazon will be delivering AWS designed racks of AWS compute and storage. These racks will have ability to run AWS services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).

According to the announcement, "In both cases, AWS will deliver the racks to customers, install them (if customers prefer), and handle all maintenance and replacement of racks. These AWS Outposts will be 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 in AWS or any other AWS service."

Executive Opinion

CEO of AWS, Andy Jassy, 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. 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. So we started with what our customers were asking for and worked backwards. They told us they want 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. So, we tried to reimagine what customers really wanted when running in hybrid mode, and developed AWS Outposts.”

Chief executive officer, VMware, Pat Gelsinger, said, “VMware Cloud on AWS broke the barriers between the data center and the cloud by combining the best of the private cloud and public cloud in the AWS cloud. Today we expand our strategic collaboration with AWS to provide our mutual enterprise customers with more choice and options as they extend their hybrid cloud environments to drive agility, simplicity, security, and full infrastructure interoperability. Our new offerings, VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2, further extend VMware’s vision for consistent infrastructure and consistent operations from the data center to the cloud to the edge.”

AWS OutPosts Services Availability

AWS Outposts will initially come in two variants:

• VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts - for customers using VMware control plane and APIs in their on-prem data centers. The entire VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) including compute, storage, and networking infrastructure will be available. VMware Cloud on AWS console will help customers with AWS OutPosts with management and integration with other AWS services.
• Native AWS Outposts - for customers using exact APIs and control plane they’re used to running in AWS cloud but now on the on-premise data center. It will include VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2 featuring VMware technologies and services to work across VMware and Amazon EC2 environments, NSX (to help bridge AWS Outposts to local data center networks), VMware AppDefense (to protect known good applications), and VMware vRealize Automation (for workload provisioning).

AWS Outposts are currently in private preview.
The public GA launch is in the second half of 2019.