AWS makes S3 on Outposts available for use 'just like in the cloud'

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the availability of its Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for AWS Outposts customers.

AWS Outposts is effectively a hybrid IT service. Customers can run compute and storage on premise, with fully-managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware. The service lets users run workloads on premise with the same AWS APIs, control plane, hardware, and tools that allow connection to other AWS applications.

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These Outposts are managed, monitored, and updated by AWS "just like in the cloud".

Wednesday's announcement means Outposts customers can now use S3 APIs to store and retrieve data in the same way they would access or use data in a regular AWS region.

This means that many tools, apps, scripts, or utilities that already use S3 APIs, either directly or through SDKs, can now be configured to store that data locally on a customer's Outposts.

Outposts are connected to an AWS region and are also able to access Amazon S3 in AWS regions, however, Wednesday's update allows users of the APIs to store data on the AWS Outposts hardware and process it locally.

See also: Microsoft readies its AWS Outposts hybrid competitor: Azure Stack 'Fiji'

The benefit to customers, AWS said, is a reduction in data transfers to AWS regions, as filtering, compression, or other pre-processing can be performed on data locally without having to send all of it to a region.

"Speaking of keeping your data local, any objects and the associated metadata and tags are always stored on the Outpost and are never sent or stored elsewhere," the cloud giant said in a blog post. "However, it is essential to remember that if you have data residency requirements, you may need to put some guardrails in place to ensure no one has the permissions to copy objects manually from your Outposts to an AWS region."

S3 on Outposts provides a new Amazon S3 storage class, S3 Outposts.

By default, all data stored is encrypted using SSE-S3, and optionally server-side encryption with a user's own encryption keys.

S3 on Outposts will give users 48TB or 96TB of S3 storage capacity, with up 100 buckets on each Outpost.

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