AWS provides update on Outposts launch, supported services
Featured
Amazon Web Services is finally revealing more details about its forthcoming data center hardware as-a-service offering AWS Outposts. Announced in November, Outposts essentially brings AWS cloud hardware on-premises, with fully managed configurable compute and storage racks that enable customers to run compute and storage on-premises and connect to the rest of AWS's cloud.
Matt Garman, VP of Compute Services at AWS, wrote in a Wednesday blog post that Outposts will be generally available by the end of 2019. He also shed some light on which AWS services will be able to run locally on Outposts at launch, along with some scenarios Outposts is well suited for.
According to Garman, Outposts will support a range of Amazon EC2 instances -- C5, M5, R5, I3en and G4, both with and without local storage options -- and Amazon EBS volumes locally. The services that will be supported locally on Outposts will include Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS clusters for container-based applications, Amazon EMR clusters for data analytics, and Amazon RDS instances for relational database services. Garman said support for additional services including Amazon SageMaker and Amazon MSK will arrive soon after launch.
As for use cases, Garman highlighted scenarios in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, media and entertainment as areas where Outposts could have the most traction.
"One of the most common scenarios is applications that need single-digit millisecond latency to end-users or onsite equipment," Garman wrote. "Customers may need to run compute-intensive workloads on their manufacturing factory floors with precision and quality. Others have graphics-intensive applications such as image analysis that need low-latency access to end-users or storage-intensive workloads that collect and process hundreds of TBs of data a day. Customers want to integrate their cloud deployments with their on-premises environments and use AWS services for a consistent hybrid experience."