Amazon Web Services (AWS) has always been a pure cloud provider. At re:invent on Wednesday however, the leading public cloud provider announced that it is bringing its hardware on-premises for the first time. Called AWS Outposts, it’s the same EC2 hardware AWS uses in its own datacentres.
AWS Outposts are fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware. Some customers who are virtualised on VMware use on-premises VMware tools to manage their infrastructure on AWS. Others may have certain workloads that need to be on-premises, especially latency sensitive workloads.
AWS’ solution solves these challenges by packing racks of AWS compute and storage, with the ability to run services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).
In partnership with VMWare, there are two ways customers can get onboard: VMWare Cloud on AWS and AWS native.
VMware Cloud on AWS allows customers to use the same VMware control panel and APIs they’ve been using to run their infrastructure. It delivers the entire VMware Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC) – compute, storage, and networking infrastructure – to run on-premises.
The AWS native variant of AWS Outposts satisfies customers who prefer the same APIs and control panel that they are used to in AWS’ cloud, but now on-premises. Customers can also use VMware’s new offering – VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2, which packs popular VMware technologies and services that work across VMware and Amazon EC2 environments.
AWS Outposts is essentially an extension of a customer’s Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud).
“They (Customers) told us that 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, abd 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,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS at his re:Invent keynote.
Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware, who joined Jassy on stage at re:Invent said, “VWware Cloud on AWS broke the barriers between the datacentre and the cloud by combining the best of the private cloud and public cloud in the AWS cloud.”
AWS Outposts are currently in private preview. The public GA launch will be coming in the second half of 2019. To learn more head over to aws.amazon.com/outposts.
Follow AWS re:Invent updates here: vernonchan.com/tag/reinvent and follow the official hashtag #reInvent
