6 ms·

AWS Outposts

63 points by psim1 5y ago

lovetocode 5y ago
I have had the pleasure of building on an outpost for several months. It’s an interesting experience.
- Johnny555 5y ago
  I'd be interested in knowing what drove you to Outposts in the first place -- low latency or regulatory reasons? (Or something else?)
- r00fus 5y ago
  Now you have us interested..
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  Please tell us more
- HyperRational 5y ago
  I read an article that claims sales for Outposts have not met expectations due to software issues and their very high price.
onychomys 5y ago
So I must be missing something here. They drive to your workplace with a truck and drop off a bunch of servers and wires and stuff and get them all set up for you. Then you log into them and use the same APIs that you'd use if you connected to a normal AWS bucket? Why not just do the cloud server instead? Is this for people who have to move/store very large amounts of data such that transfer time is an issue? Or is it just a thing to let you not worry about sysadmin-type stuff because the Amazon dude does all of it for you?
- voxic11 5y ago
  This is for businesses which have regulatory requirements that they store data in-state. State governments don't like it when certain data is stored out of state. They like the idea that they can just dispatch their own police to seize the required records from the server rather than needing to ask for the cooperation of another government and its own police force. I know specifically its popular in the regulated gambling and insurance industries.
- r00fus 5y ago
  Yes - take for example gene sequencing - that requires a huge amount of data shuffling and going cloud for that is infeasible simply for the data transfer costs. With Outpost this becomes feasible. This "cloud in a box" idea has been around for a long time, but I guess Amazon has enough brainshare for the tooling that it may make sense for companies to have this for data-intensive compute and keep the same skillset requirements as the rest of their fully-clouded operations.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    I do genome sequencing and this is very true. You are either all-in on cloud or do the processing completely in house. The data egress fees are more than enough to offset any benefit to a hybrid approach. I’m more curious if there is an equivalent to S3 for on-prem. I bet not due to reliability constraints, but something like this would be nice. I can’t say there would be much benefit to using AWS Outposts for genome sequencing without an S3 local cache.
    - matt_heimer 5y ago
      If you are asking if Outputs includes S3, yes, https://aws.amazon.com/s3/outposts/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/outposts/ If you are asking if there are stand-alone S3 API offerings, you might want to look at MinIO. Reliability mostly requires extra hardware and configuration - https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-erasure-code-quickstart-guide.html https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-erasure-code-quickstart-guide...
Johnny555 5y ago
Outposts is certainly not a cheap solution, a dev rack with one m5.24xl is $124K, a similarly configured Dell server (but without the rack or AWS management) is less than half that price. https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/ I didn't calculate to see if the bigger racks are more cost effective, but I'm guessing not if 5 m5.24xlarge, 4 c5.24xlarge, 3 r5.24xlarge costs $690K.
- Trisell 5y ago
  The ability to lift and shift existing AWS automation tools to on-prem workloads is more the worth the money. At a lot of organizations on-prem servers are heavily controlled by teams that have no interest in automation or quick provisioning. Being able to stick one of these into a data center and get full access to a significant number of AWS services while being able to tell security and others that certain data isn’t in the cloud is priceless. People overlook the cost savings of being able to turn your Devs and DevOps teams loose on-prem and no longer be blocked by system admins who have no desire to help you increase your development velocity.
IanCal 5y ago
This seems like it's available in surprisingly small increments, does anyone have pricing info? The public page easy to find has things for very different scales (at over 5k/mo to start).
- slownews45 5y ago
  I'm interested in this as well. c6gd.16xlarge instance for example. Even going through the order flow - nothing actually shows up for pricing which is a bit unusual for an AWS service. Must be somewhat manual on the backend still?
  - akerl_ 5y ago
    They price by the rack: https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/
- btgeekboy 5y ago
  You're probably on the Outposts rack section; you want to be on the Outposts servers section: https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/servers/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3 https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/servers/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3
  - IanCal 5y ago
    I was, yes, thank you!
dustintrex 5y ago
This a) is not new, and b) is not unique. The other clouds have their equivalents: Azure Stack, Google Anthos/Distributed Cloud. For most part, with any of these you get the steep pricing of cloud with the maintenance overhead, lack of flexibility and lengthy commitment periods of on-prem, meaning they're unlikely to be a sensible option unless you have regulatory requirements that force you into it. One use case is wanting to run the same cloud stack globally, but having a market where there is no local region and local law requires that data stay in country.
- daxfohl 5y ago
  My understanding is that Anthos is more like AWS K8s Everywhere (and Azure Arc), and that Google doesn't really have an Outposts style offering. Is that not the case?
  - dustintrex 5y ago
    They announced Google Distributed Cloud recently: > Google Distributed Cloud is a portfolio of fully managed hardware and software solutions which extends Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services to the edge and into your data centers. https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud
- awsthro00945 5y ago
  >This a) is not new This specific announcement is new, because this specific announcement is about Outposts in a new, smaller form factor that just went GA today. >One use case is wanting to run the same cloud stack globally, but having a market where there is no local region and local law requires that data stay in country. The use case mentioned in the announcement is more about running EC2 instances in small branch offices or retail stores where you 1) still want to run AWS, 2) need the servers to be in very close proximity, and 3) don't have the room or infrastructure for a full rack.
  - squiffsquiff 5y ago
    Why do you "need the servers to be in very close proximity" in a retail store? It's not high frequency trading
inkeddeveloper 5y ago
So, it’s the fog instead of the cloud.
- ilumanty 5y ago
  The Gavin Belson Signature Box
slownews45 5y ago
Not exactly the same, but the anywhere stuff (ECS etc) - I've found it pretty enjoyable to use. You basically can throw some beefy local servers into the pools and away you go with your standard jobs. When you need to maintain things locally, you can (usually) migrate loads pretty directly to an AWS region. Pricing locally is really good in many cases vs AWS and the ECS Anywhere fees themselves for example are pretty modest. $8/month range per machine (which can of course host a fair bit).
thedougd 5y ago
Is my understanding correct that you may not overprovision an Outpost host like you would with a VMware host?

AWS Outposts

63 points by psim1 5y ago

lovetocode 5y ago

I have had the pleasure of building on an outpost for several months. It’s an interesting experience.

Johnny555 5y ago
I'd be interested in knowing what drove you to Outposts in the first place -- low latency or regulatory reasons? (Or something else?)
r00fus 5y ago
Now you have us interested..
TeeMassive 5y ago
Please tell us more
HyperRational 5y ago
I read an article that claims sales for Outposts have not met expectations due to software issues and their very high price.

onychomys 5y ago

So I must be missing something here. They drive to your workplace with a truck and drop off a bunch of servers and wires and stuff and get them all set up for you. Then you log into them and use the same APIs that you'd use if you connected to a normal AWS bucket? Why not just do the cloud server instead? Is this for people who have to move/store very large amounts of data such that transfer time is an issue? Or is it just a thing to let you not worry about sysadmin-type stuff because the Amazon dude does all of it for you?

voxic11 5y ago
This is for businesses which have regulatory requirements that they store data in-state. State governments don't like it when certain data is stored out of state. They like the idea that they can just dispatch their own police to seize the required records from the server rather than needing to ask for the cooperation of another government and its own police force. I know specifically its popular in the regulated gambling and insurance industries.
r00fus 5y ago
Yes - take for example gene sequencing - that requires a huge amount of data shuffling and going cloud for that is infeasible simply for the data transfer costs. With Outpost this becomes feasible. This "cloud in a box" idea has been around for a long time, but I guess Amazon has enough brainshare for the tooling that it may make sense for companies to have this for data-intensive compute and keep the same skillset requirements as the rest of their fully-clouded operations.
- mbreese 5y ago
  I do genome sequencing and this is very true. You are either all-in on cloud or do the processing completely in house. The data egress fees are more than enough to offset any benefit to a hybrid approach. I’m more curious if there is an equivalent to S3 for on-prem. I bet not due to reliability constraints, but something like this would be nice. I can’t say there would be much benefit to using AWS Outposts for genome sequencing without an S3 local cache.
  - matt_heimer 5y ago
    If you are asking if Outputs includes S3, yes, https://aws.amazon.com/s3/outposts/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/outposts/ If you are asking if there are stand-alone S3 API offerings, you might want to look at MinIO. Reliability mostly requires extra hardware and configuration - https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-erasure-code-quickstart-guide.html https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-erasure-code-quickstart-guide...

Johnny555 5y ago

Outposts is certainly not a cheap solution, a dev rack with one m5.24xl is $124K, a similarly configured Dell server (but without the rack or AWS management) is less than half that price. https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/ I didn't calculate to see if the bigger racks are more cost effective, but I'm guessing not if 5 m5.24xlarge, 4 c5.24xlarge, 3 r5.24xlarge costs $690K.

Trisell 5y ago
The ability to lift and shift existing AWS automation tools to on-prem workloads is more the worth the money. At a lot of organizations on-prem servers are heavily controlled by teams that have no interest in automation or quick provisioning. Being able to stick one of these into a data center and get full access to a significant number of AWS services while being able to tell security and others that certain data isn’t in the cloud is priceless. People overlook the cost savings of being able to turn your Devs and DevOps teams loose on-prem and no longer be blocked by system admins who have no desire to help you increase your development velocity.

IanCal 5y ago

This seems like it's available in surprisingly small increments, does anyone have pricing info? The public page easy to find has things for very different scales (at over 5k/mo to start).

slownews45 5y ago
I'm interested in this as well. c6gd.16xlarge instance for example. Even going through the order flow - nothing actually shows up for pricing which is a bit unusual for an AWS service. Must be somewhat manual on the backend still?
- akerl_ 5y ago
  They price by the rack: https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/
btgeekboy 5y ago
You're probably on the Outposts rack section; you want to be on the Outposts servers section: https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/servers/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3 https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/servers/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3
- IanCal 5y ago
  I was, yes, thank you!

dustintrex 5y ago

This a) is not new, and b) is not unique. The other clouds have their equivalents: Azure Stack, Google Anthos/Distributed Cloud. For most part, with any of these you get the steep pricing of cloud with the maintenance overhead, lack of flexibility and lengthy commitment periods of on-prem, meaning they're unlikely to be a sensible option unless you have regulatory requirements that force you into it. One use case is wanting to run the same cloud stack globally, but having a market where there is no local region and local law requires that data stay in country.

daxfohl 5y ago
My understanding is that Anthos is more like AWS K8s Everywhere (and Azure Arc), and that Google doesn't really have an Outposts style offering. Is that not the case?
- dustintrex 5y ago
  They announced Google Distributed Cloud recently: > Google Distributed Cloud is a portfolio of fully managed hardware and software solutions which extends Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services to the edge and into your data centers. https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud
awsthro00945 5y ago
>This a) is not new This specific announcement is new, because this specific announcement is about Outposts in a new, smaller form factor that just went GA today. >One use case is wanting to run the same cloud stack globally, but having a market where there is no local region and local law requires that data stay in country. The use case mentioned in the announcement is more about running EC2 instances in small branch offices or retail stores where you 1) still want to run AWS, 2) need the servers to be in very close proximity, and 3) don't have the room or infrastructure for a full rack.
- squiffsquiff 5y ago
  Why do you "need the servers to be in very close proximity" in a retail store? It's not high frequency trading

inkeddeveloper 5y ago

So, it’s the fog instead of the cloud.

ilumanty 5y ago
The Gavin Belson Signature Box

slownews45 5y ago

Not exactly the same, but the anywhere stuff (ECS etc) - I've found it pretty enjoyable to use. You basically can throw some beefy local servers into the pools and away you go with your standard jobs. When you need to maintain things locally, you can (usually) migrate loads pretty directly to an AWS region. Pricing locally is really good in many cases vs AWS and the ECS Anywhere fees themselves for example are pretty modest. $8/month range per machine (which can of course host a fair bit).

thedougd 5y ago

Is my understanding correct that you may not overprovision an Outpost host like you would with a VMware host?