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Fully managed service lets customers in India run their workloads on-premises and seamlessly connect with the broad array of AWS services in the cloud using the same operating model and infrastructure they currently use
AWS Outposts, recently launched in India, delivers a fully managed service. This service allows the customers to run AWS compute, storage, database and other services on-premise, while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud. AWS Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. With AWS Outposts, customers can use the same AWS APIs, control plane, tools, and hardware on-premises as in the AWS cloud to deliver a consistent hybrid experience.
Customers in India who have workloads that require low latency access to on-premises systems or have local data processing requirements can benefit from AWS Outposts. These include applications that may need to generate near real-time responses, communicate with other on-premises systems, or control on-site equipment such as factory floor equipment, health management systems, and retail point of sale systems. This was announced to be in general availability as a service at re:Invent 2019 in the first week of December. Since then AWS has moved on to expand the presence and availability of AWS Outposts across multiple other regions and multiple other countries.
Puneet Chandok, President, Commercial Business, India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services believes with AWS Outposts the customers can benefit from the accelerated pace of innovation in the cloud, while securely storing and processing sensitive data on-premises. “As AWS Outposts is a fully managed service by AWS, our customers can also focus on their end users and drive innovation that differentiates their businesses, while leaving the responsibility of managing the infrastructure to us,” he adds.
With AWS Outposts, customers can choose from a range of compute, storage, and graphics-optimised Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, and related Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume options. Customers can then easily run a broad range of AWS services locally, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), and can connect directly to regional services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets or Amazon DynamoDB through private connections.
Understanding the AWS Paradigm
To understand the genesis of AWS Outposts, it makes sense to understand the global infrastructure of AWS. AWS has 24 distinct Geographic Regions around the world. In this new normal, AWS launched two regions: one in Cape Town (South Arica) and one in Milan (Italy) bringing the total to 76 Availability Zones. An availability zone is a subset of a region, which has at least one or multiple datacenters. AWS never launches a global region without at least launching two Availability Zones. In the Mumbai region in India, it has three Availability Zones and 216 Points of Presence, CDN service, caching services for the customers, as well as nearly 100 Direct Connect locations where customers can just plug in their lease lines to actually be connected, bypassing the Internet via private connection to AWS regions.
Barring some parts of China, most of AWS geographical regions are interconnected with a 100 gigabit network, and they are redundant. Applications are easy from the AWS console now within these regions. To keep the 175 plus services running, AWS has been working directly with Intel, AMD and ARM to actually make in certain cases custom hardware to run in the AWS datacenters because of being high on performance, flexibility, and to accommodate security with the multi-tenant model. As of today, AWS has well over 200 plus different kinds of instance types, which is just your virtual machines running on the public cloud, depending on CPU memory, networking configurations across these three different chipsets to address a wide variety of workloads whatever the customers choose to run from enterprise applications to analytics to B2C applications at Internet scale, so on and so forth.
The Hows, Whys and Whats of AWS Outposts
“Now, AWS Outposts is not to be confused with a separate device,” explains Santanu Dutt, Technology, Southeast Asia, AWS. “It is the same AWS designed infrastructure that we have within our 24 geographic regions, so consider this as a literally seamless extension of the AWS region with the same experience. And it is basically monitored and managed by AWS as an extension of our region, so in that sense it is no different to an end customer. To a customer, apart from the rack being shipped to their premises, AWS Outposts will look and be managed from the AWS console, just like they would actually manage the rest of the AWS infrastructure,” Dutt elaborates further.
There is obviously a rationale behind the launch. AWS believes about 90% of the organizations across the world are already using cloud or thinking about cloud and planning about it as a part of their 12 month, or 24 month journey. These customers still have a wide variety of workloads, which are still on premises and need to stay on premises, and they need to work in a hybrid extension to the public cloud with AWS. This could range from applications that require extremely low latency (single digit low latency applications), to processing of applications that need to stay on premises because they are dependent on some legacy in mind or historical reasons, with legacy applications that are on premises. They tend to be closely associated and integrated with those, be it non-x86RISC-based legacy applications or mainframes, or even otherwise.
Therefore there are use cases across remote offices, factories, healthcare institutes and hospitals that need to do near real time patient data analysis, and telcos and financial institutions that need to do processing on premises, but still need the extension of the public cloud in a hybrid manner. And so those applications for the time being need to still be staying on premises, but the customers had the same age-old issues in terms of ordering, having long cycles, the hardware not truly being cloud native. “And so, those blockers actually made them ask for a truly seamless public cloud version of an on premises hybrid infrastructure, which is what AWS Outposts is,” asserts Dutt. “Because it Is just a seamless extension of the AWS region connected with the AWS region, customers can treat it as that, except that the local processing happens on premises to actually cater to the customer’s demands and issues of low single digit millisecond latencies, integration requirements with on premises legacy applications, or even remote offices and factory floors and medical Institutes,” he adds.
How do customers get started with AWS Outposts? Dutt feels it is simple. “AWS customers can actually order it on their console. All they need to do is go to their console, select AWS Outposts, order their compute and storage capacity as might be relevant for their applications, and an AWS person will call them, look at the feasibility check in their datacenter. Once the installation is done, customers can basically launch it using the same tools and APIs and command line and the console that they have been using for years on the AWS console.” There is no difference at all so they can reuse their existing skill set, there is no upskilling required to reuse AWS Outposts because it has basically the same extension.
AWS has pricing just like everything else – a standard rate card across all the regions that it has published for AWS Outposts. The pricing for AWS Outposts starts from about $250K. The model is that customers have to purchase AWS Outposts as a service for three years. They can pay for all upfront, or partial upfront, or no upfront depending on how they want to pay as a customer. The minimum commitment is three years.
After that AWS actually ships AWS Outputs rack inside and then depending on the instance type (the amount of CPU and memory configuration that they have and the instance model), there are SKUs that are there for the customer to choose. The customer can select and order, and AWS will ship the Outpost to the customer, and the billing starts accordingly. The cost starts from anywhere between $225K D for an all upfront offering for three years, and this includes installation, maintenance, rack and stack, replacement of modules and spare parts, if they need to be, and the compute and the EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Store) instance cost itself for the three year period depending on what configuration that they are choosing. That is for developer instance to production instances, so it is probably on similar lines to the public cloud. There is yet no on demand version where customers can order AWS Outposts for one hour because as you can imagine the feasibility of that would not be appropriate, because it’s basically shipping a piece of hardware to the customer base.
Indian Partner Network
With AWS Outposts, customers in India can work with the AWS Partner Network (APN) to leverage their deep experience helping businesses move applications to AWS cloud through all aspects of complex migration projects. These can include initial discovery and assessment, planning, migration, and operations, as well as cloud strategy and technology advisory services to migrate and run workloads on AWS Outposts.
Cloud4C, a CtrlS Group Company, is an APN Advanced Consulting Partner in India. “Customers can choose to host AWS Outposts in their own on-premises environment to meet compliance requirements, or for latency-sensitive applications, and additionally benefit from unified managed services and security operations services offered by Cloud4C across AWS Availability Zones,” says Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder and CEO, Cloud4C.
“Our AWS-related business is growing 70% year-on-year and we are excited to see more innovations coming from AWS. Cloud4C will offer scalable and elastic cloud hosting environments on AWS Outposts in multiple locations, and datacenter hosting space, managed disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) for mission critical workloads, and virtual desktop infrastructure on AWS Outposts. Customers have the option to host AWS Outposts in their own datacenter orat CtrlS Rated-4 Hyperscale Datacenters in India, and achieve a truly consistent and seamless hybrid cloud experience,” he adds.
Powerupcloud Technologies, is an APN Premier Consulting partner and part of Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI), highlights the opportunity for AWS Outposts among enterprises. Says Siva S, Founder and CEO, Powerupcloud Technologies, “We are excited about the availability of AWS Outposts in India. AWS Outposts help customers run a truly consistent hybrid infrastructure with its seamless cloud and on-premises extensions. By using AWS Outposts, large enterprise companies will now find it easier to move large SAP, Oracle, and custom software workloads to the cloud. Customers can access this fully-managed hybrid setup from a simple login via their AWS management consoleAWS Outposts has the potential to redefine the world of hybrid cloud.”
Tech Mahindra, an APN Advanced Consulting Partner focusing on digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering services, highlights how AWS Outposts can enable innovative enterprise and network applications. “The emergence of 5G and edge computing is fundamentally changing the cloud to a distributed edge cloud, and supercharging digital transformations. The ability to serve latency-sensitive applications closer to the customer with AWS Outposts will create a new wave of innovation in enterprise and network applications. As part of our TechMNxt charter, we are excited to partner with an innovator like AWS in this ground-breaking initiative,” says Manish Mangal, CTO, Network Services, Tech Mahindra.
Global and Indian Use Cases
Philips Healthcare platform is one of AWS’ initial beta customers in Q3/Q4 of 2019. They have factory healthcare systems around hospitals where they have to process, and come up with outputs in near real time of patient data that they are monitoring, and so they have to do analytics quickly. They have hundreds of these centers and units across the United States and what they required was a seamless extension of the AWS public cloud into those healthcare systems, healthcare centers with their systems to work with. And they did not want a different interface and use on premises hardware, simply because it could be disconnected on a different version. They have been using AWS Outposts to actually extend the AWS region and the analytics that they’ve been doing on premises has just been seamless.
Morningstar, which is a research institute, has also been doing the same as Philips Healthcare. They wanted to extend their hybrid capabilities from the AWS cloud, and they are another public use case of AWS Outposts.
Dutt is however reticent on the percentage of existing customers in India who will adopt AWS Outposts. “In India for years we have had a wide variety of customers, starting from enterprises to start-ups, right from the NDTVs of the world to HDFC Life to Aditya Birla Finance to startup customers like shaadi.com, Dream11, and so on. I do not think we can comment on what percentage of customers will adopt it, it is open for anyone,” he says. Customers who come in the realm of requirements where they have either very low latency applications that need to decide on premises. Or it could be those who have dependencies on premises, or even have use cases of factory floors, or media and entertainment companies which need to run VFX and hybrid workloads remotely, or telcos or FSI customers. These are customers that run on AWS with some workloads and that would be great candidates for AWS Outposts.
