The 2018 IDG Cloud Computing study was conducted to measure cloud computing trends among technology decision-makers, which includes their usage and plans across various cloud service and deployment models, investments, business drivers and impact on business strategy and plans.
It was found that Seventy-three percent of organizations have at least one application, or a portion of their computing infrastructure already in the cloud
And, 17% of organizations plan to do so within the next 12 months.
So, what is causing the delay in adopting the cloud?
There were two main reasons there was this hesitation or constrain.
First, Low Latency Requirements:
Some of your business critical applications are sensitive to latency and variability in latency. You need applications to run on premises to respond to events with extremely small millisecond latencies in order to ensure smooth and predictable operations, to provide superior experience to end users, and to maintain competitive advantage.you have adopted the Amazon cloud for centralized operations but find you need to run compute, graphics, or storage intensive workloads on premises to execute localized workflows with precision and quality. These may be workloads running on factory floors for automated operations in manufacturing, real time patient diagnosis or medical imaging, and content and media streaming.
Second, Local Data Processing & Data Integrity needs:there has been an exponential increase in the data that is being generated by users and end devices and data integrity is a key concern in locations that are bandwidth constrained. You have data intensive workloads that collect and process hundreds of TBs of data a day. Transmission of this large volume of data to the cloud is wasteful and expensive. Transmitting message or data streams over long distance internet connections can also lead to packet loss resulting in data integrity problems.It would be good to process the data locally to respond to events in real time and to have better control on analyzing, backing up, and restoring the data. At the same time, you would also like to leverage cloud services such as AI/ML frameworks or analytics as they do in the cloud for data visualization and insights; use services such as RDS to store data locally and seamlessly transfer it to the cloud later. Applications that process this data to drive better data visualization or business insights need to run on premises close to the data sources or end devices.
So if we should summarize , you want
Same reliable, secure and high performance infrastructure
Same operational consistency
Same services, APIs, tools for automation, deployment pipelines, security controls which can provide you the same pace of innovation as in the cloud.
So, what is AWS Outposts?
Outposts enable you to develop once, and deploy in the AWS cloud or on-premises without having to rewrite your applications. With Outposts, you have the same hardware and software infrastructure and a consistent set of services and tools across your AWS cloud and on-premises environments to build and run modern, cloud-native applications anywhere
AWS Outposts are fully managed and supported by AWS, and AWS automatically manages and updates AWS Outposts as part of its ongoing operations in the public AWS region. You do not have to worry about updating or patching infrastructure
AWS Outposts allow you to choose the AWS native variant of AWS Outposts or the VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts variant as your management plane for your APIs, management console, automation, governance policies, and security controls for all your applications across the AWS cloud and on-premises locations.
You use the same AWS Console to view and manage their resources, whether those resources and services are in the AWS Cloud or on premises. You can use the same AWS CLI and SDKs as you use today to run and deploy applications, using the API endpoints as you use today to run applications in the AWS Cloud.
That said, it is also important to understand that AWS Outposts is not a replacement for building and running applications in the AWS Cloud. If an application can run in the AWS Cloud, it should. The scalability, operational efficiency, and cost optimizations gained by running applications in the AWS Cloud will always be second to none. AWS Outposts allows you to extend the AWS Cloud to your on premises for applications that need to run on premises, as well providing a jumping point for migrating enterprise applications on premises to AWS that have longer and more involved migration timelines and dependencies.
So, what does the Outpost look like?
It comes in a 42U rack form, fully assembled, ready to be rolled into position.
AWS associated will show up at your data center at a coordinated with with the rack. They’ll roll it in, plug the power and network.
It comes with centralized redundant power conversion unit with DC power distribution.
It has redundant active components such as switches and spare capacity.
AWS Outposts will be available in two options:
The AWS native variant of Outposts allows you to use the same APIs and control plane you use in the AWS cloud to build and run your applications, but do it on-premises. You will be able to run Amazon EC2 instances and EBS volumes on Outposts. And, at launch or soon thereafter, services such as RDS, ECS, EKS, SageMaker, and EMR will also be available locally on the AWS native variant of Outposts. Other services, such as S3, DynamoDB, and Lambda will be available as Private Link endpoints in the customer’s own VPC.
The VMware variant allows you to run VMware Cloud on AWS locally on Outposts to use the same VMware control plane and APIs you use to run your on-premises infrastructure. This variant delivers the entire VMware Software-Defined Datacenter - compute, storage, and networking infrastructure - to run on-premises using AWS Outposts and allows you to take advantage of the ease of management and integration with AWS services.
Outpost is currently available to be installed in the US, in all EU countries, including Switzerland and Norway, Japan, the republic of Korea and Australia.
We will be adding more countries starting this quarter, so stay tuned.
Similarly, we have a list of supported regions to which you can connect Outposts to.
Additional regions will be supported later this quarter.
Note that, you can pick any region to connect to depending on your requirements. For example, if the Outposts is installed in Dublin but all your resources are part of eu-central-1, you can establish your connection to eu-central for shared resource access.
AWS Outposts catalog includes options supporting the latest generation Intel powered EC2 instance types with or without local instance storage.
General purpose (M5/M5d) instances provide a balance of compute, memory, and network resources and can be used for general-purpose workloads, web and application servers, backend servers for enterprise applications, gaming servers, and caching fleets.
Compute optimized (C5/C5d) instances are optimized for compute-intensive workloads and deliver cost-effective high performance at a low price per compute ratio.
Memory optimized (R5/R5d) instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory.
Graphics optimized (G4dn) are designed to help accelerate machine learning inference and graphics-intensive workloads. They can be used for machine learning inference for applications like adding metadata to an image, object detection, recommender systems, automated speech recognition, and language translation. They also provide a very cost-effective platform for building and running graphics-intensive applications, such as remote graphics workstations, video transcoding, photo-realistic design, and game streaming in the cloud.
I/O optimized (I3en) provides dense Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD instance storage optimized for low latency, high random I/O performance, high sequential disk throughput, and offers the lowest price per GB of SSD instance storage on Amazon EC2. It is well suited for NoSQL databases (Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis), in-memory databases (SAP HANA, Aerospike), scale-out transactional databases, distributed file systems, data warehousing, Elasticsearch, analytics workloads.
In addition, Outposts offers local instance storage, and Elastic Block Store (EBS) gp2 volumes for persistent block storage. Just as in the AWS Region, you can use EBS gp2 volumes for boot or data volumes, and attach or detach EBS volumes to EC2 instances on your Outpost. It provides snapshot and restore capabilities and lets you increase volume size without any performance impact. All EBS volumes and snapshots on Outposts are fully encrypted by default. Any EBS snapshots will be stored using Amazon S3 in the Region associated with your Outpost. EBS is offered in tiers of 2.7 TB, 11 TB, 33 TB, and 55 TB and above.
All Amazon tools will just work as well. API calls will automatically be logged via CloudTrail, existing Cloud Formation templates will also work.
AWS tools such as AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and others can be used to run and manage applications running on premises just the same as they are used for cloud workloads today. They will have same security controls such as IAM permissions, VPC security groups, and access control lists.
You can access AWS tools running in the region such as AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, Elastic BeanStalk, Cloud 9, and others to run and manage applications on Outposts the same way as you do in the cloud today.
You can seamlessly extend your VPC on premises by creating a subnet and associating it with an Outpost just as you associate subnets with an AZ in the cloud.
<Click> As the control plane is in the public region, you can access a wide range of AWS services locally on your Outpost or in region through public endpoints or privately through VPN.
<Click> Instances in the Outpost can securely talk to other instances in your VPC through private IP addresses. Use Interface Endpoints (powered by Private Link) to access all regional AWS services such as DynamoDB and S3 in your private VPC environment or use their regional public endpoints as shown here
You can seamlessly extend your VPC on premises by creating a subnet and associating it with an Outpost just as you associate subnets with an AZ in the cloud.
<Click> As the control plane is in the public region, you can access a wide range of AWS services locally on your Outpost or in region through public endpoints or privately through VPN.
<Click> Instances in the Outpost can securely talk to other instances in your VPC through private IP addresses. Use Interface Endpoints (powered by Private Link) to access all regional AWS services such as DynamoDB and S3 in your private VPC environment or use their regional public endpoints as shown here
You can seamlessly extend your VPC on premises by creating a subnet and associating it with an Outpost just as you associate subnets with an AZ in the cloud.
<Click> As the control plane is in the public region, you can access a wide range of AWS services locally on your Outpost or in region through public endpoints or privately through VPN.
<Click> Instances in the Outpost can securely talk to other instances in your VPC through private IP addresses. Use Interface Endpoints (powered by Private Link) to access all regional AWS services such as DynamoDB and S3 in your private VPC environment or use their regional public endpoints as shown here
You can Connect to your local network equipment via ports provided in the Outpost’s top of rack (TOR) switches
You can Configure Virtual Interfaces (VIFs) mapping to your VLANs using Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP)
You can Configure the new local gateway (LGW) on the Outpost to route traffic to and from your local network using these VIFs
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Three steps to getting started with the Outposts.
You order, we install and ready to launch!
First, you go to the console and browse through the catalog to find the configuration that meets your needs. You can Filter by instance types, EBS storage, services supported, and site constraints (eg, power draw or networking uplink)
You’ll then create a logical Outpost with site and network information
Once done, you can place an order right from the console.
Once you place an order, our associates will get in touch with you to confirm the information.
Within few weeks, AWS associates will deliver to your site
AWS associates will install and configure the Outpost to connect to the AWS Region and with your local network
We can also install Multiple racks at a site provided you have the power, space, cooling and network connectivity to support it.