Hybrid AWS Outposts Offering Extended To Seven New Regions
AWS Outposts already is deployed in several customer data centers, and AWS can install it today in any of the 38 supported countries, according to an AWS spokesperson.
Amazon Web Services' new AWS Outposts hybrid cloud offering now is available in seven new regions.
AWS Outposts extends AWS’ cloud infrastructure, services, APIs and tools into customers’ on-premises data centers or colocation sites for the first time with its compute and storage server racks outfitted with AWS-designed hardware.
The fully managed offering now is available in the additional AWS regions of Canada (Central region, located in the Montreal metropolitan area), the EU (London, Paris and Stockholm regions), Middle East (Bahrain) and Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore regions), the cloud provider said today.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced the general availability of the native version of AWS Outposts at the AWS re:Invent 2019 conference in December. Until today, it had been available in the U.S. East (northern Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon), U.S. East (Ohio), EU West (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.
“AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads that need low latency access to on-premises applications or systems, local data processing or for local data storage needs,” according to AWS’ website announcement of the additional availability. “With the new regional expansion, customers can connect to the region closest to their data centers and on-premises facilities.”
An AWS executive was not available for comment
AWS is initially shipping, delivering and installing AWS Outposts server racks, but partners also are expected to eventually perform those functions once AWS fine-tunes the customer experience to the point where it believes partners can replicate it.
AWS Outposts already is deployed in several customer data centers, and AWS can install it today in any of the 38 supported countries, according to an AWS spokesperson.
“Over time, I think you can expect that we will find ways to bundle our strategic partners' software on Outposts, so that customers can order Outposts with these… partners' software already embedded…which will make it easier for them to use those products,” Jassy told CRN last year.
The VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, which allows customers to use the same VMware APIs and control plane that they use to run their on-premises infrastructure, is expected to be generally available sometime this year.
AWS Price Reductions
Separately, AWS announced it has reduced the price of its Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), launched 18 months ago, by half for all new and existing clusters. Effective today, the price is 10 cents per hour for each Amazon EKS cluster, down from the previous price of 20 cents.
AWS also has implemented an 80 percent price reduction for CloudEndure Disaster Recovery. The new price is just under 3 cents per hour or about $20 per month per server. AWS acquired CloudEndure, an Israeli-based data backed by Dell Technologies, for an estimated $200 million to $250 million last January. CloudEndure Disaster Recovery is designed to help minimize customer downtime and data loss.
“It continuously replicates the contents of your on-premises, virtual, or cloud-based systems to a low-cost staging area in the AWS region of your choice, within the confines of your AWS account,” AWS “chief evangelist” Jeff Barr said in a blog post. “The block-level replication encompasses essentially every aspect of the protected system including the operating system, configuration files, databases, applications and data files. CloudEndure Disaster Recovery can replicate any database or application that runs on supported versions of Linux or Windows and is commonly used with Oracle and SQL Server, as well as enterprise applications such as SAP.”
AWS To Expand Osaka Cloud Region
AWS also has announced plans to expand its Osaka, Japan, local cloud region into a full AWS region with three availability zones in early 2021.
It would be AWS’ ninth full region in Asia-Pacific. The existing Osaka region opened in February 2018 to select customers whose compliance guidelines for applications required greater distance between availability zones, according to AWS.
“The AWS Osaka Local Region has allowed our users in Japan to meet their disaster recovery requirements while running their workloads in the AWS Tokyo Region,” Peter DeSantis, AWS’ vice president of global infrastructure and customer support, said in a statement. “We've had so much demand for additional space and services in our Osaka region that we're excited to expand our existing Osaka infrastructure into a full AWS Region, and we look forward to making it available to all AWS users.”