Could AWS Outposts be the solution much sought after by engineers and programmers to solve latency problems on critical processing and transmission on cloud? Apparently, yes. About a year after its unveiling last November, AWS’s “hybrid” solution seems to have garnered an increasing number of interested companies. But what is it all about?
The less you spend, the less you expand!
While companies used to choose solutions with low cost and less impact on facilities and staff resources, things are fortunately changing, partly because of increasingly critical application loads. Public cloud solutions were happily embraced as soon as it was realized that on-premise ones stressed difficult scalability. Using even several different cloud solutions simultaneously has given rise to the multicloud everyone is talking about, a new frontier land not always easy to approach and most importantly, protect. Amazon AWS therefore did not miss the opportunity to come to market with a revolutionary but, more importantly, easy-to-implement product. Outposts brings native AWS services, both infrastructure services and operating models virtually to any data center, including on-premises ones.
AWS Outpost, the perfect hybrid?
Amazon offers the possibility of using the same APIs but, more importantly, the same on premise hardware as in the cloud, with Outpost acting as a “conduit” to facilitate data transmission in all those cases where latency may be an issue or local processing is preferred. Classic examples where the hybrid solution comes up as the most recommended may include financial and trading companies, telecommunications, automation and healthcare.
In practice, a rack with equal configuration to those present for Amazon’s on-cloud management is posted at the company. It’s like having a scaled-down version of AWS at your location, ready to run completely transparently, and most importantly on-premise, the best hybrid cloud solution currently offered on the market. Thus, the benefits for even less structured companies are obvious by having to deal with a single hardware and software management plan.
The main difficulties in implementing hybrid cloud solutions are thus overcome:
- Different IT and development environments for cloud and on premise operations
- Coordination of hardware and software vendors
- Onerous maintenance and upgrade services
- Increased risks on on premise security due to delay on updates and patches
Customizable and supported solutions
The Outposts infrastructure is fully managed, maintained, and supported by AWS to provide access to the latest AWS services. According to Amazon’s report, to get started simply log into the AWS Management Console and order Outposts servers, choosing from a wide variety of processing and storage options. The size of servers is fully customizable “… You can order one or more servers, quarter, half or larger units.”
AWS Outposts is available from the second half of 2019. Two variations:
1) the VMware Cloud on AWS service running on Outposts.
2) AWS Outposts that allows customers to perform computation and storage on premise, using the same native APIs used in the AWS cloud.
Here for more information – (images taken from “Introduction to AWS Outposts – AWS Online Tech Talks“)
