AWS Outposts Cheat Sheet

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer on-premises data centers and edge locations. It allows you to run AWS services locally while still being connected to the nearest AWS Region, providing a consistent hybrid cloud experience.

Core Concepts

Hybrid Cloud Model: Outposts bridge the gap between your on-premises environment and the AWS cloud. You use the same AWS Management Console, APIs, and CLI to manage both your cloud and on-premises Outposts resources.
Extension of an AWS Region: Every Outpost is a physical and logical extension of a parent AWS Region. It is managed from the region and is designed to function as part of a regional Availability Zone.
Service Link: A required, secure, and private connection from your Outpost back to its parent AWS Region. This link is used for management of the Outpost and for communication between services running on the Outpost and in the region.
Site: The physical customer location (data center or co-location facility) where the Outposts hardware is installed.

AWS Outposts Form Factors

AWS Outposts comes in two physical form factors to meet different space and capacity needs.

1. Outposts Rack

What it is: A full 42U rack of servers, switches, networking gear, and power shelves, all designed, delivered, installed, and managed by AWS.
Best for: Larger-scale on-premises workloads that require significant compute and storage capacity.
Local Services: Supports running Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes (including snapshots), and container services like ECS and EKS directly on the rack.
Networking: Uses a Local Gateway (LGW) to enable low-latency communication between the Outpost rack and your local on-premises network. The LGW serves as a central point for local network traffic.

2. Outposts Servers

What it is: Individual 1U or 2U rack-mountable servers that you can install into your existing racks.
Best for: Locations with smaller capacity needs, limited space, or edge computing use cases.
Local Services: Supports running Amazon EC2 instances that use local instance storage.
Networking: Uses a local network interface to connect to your on-premises network.
Data Persistence: For persistent storage, data can be backed up to Amazon EBS in the parent AWS Region using EBS direct APIs.

Key Features

Local Gateway (LGW) - for Racks: The LGW is a crucial networking component that:
- Allows your Outpost resources to communicate directly with your on-premises network.
- Can be used as a target in your VPC route tables for routing on-premises traffic.
- Performs Network Address Translation (NAT) for instances on the Outpost that need to communicate with the local network.
Resource Sharing: An Outpost owner can share Outpost resources (like EC2 capacity or subnets) with other AWS accounts within the same AWS Organization using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM). This allows multiple teams or business units to use a single Outpost.

Use Cases

Low-Latency Computing: Run applications that need to respond to end-users or on-premises systems in single-digit milliseconds.
Local Data Processing: Process and analyze large datasets locally, only sending the results back to the AWS Region. This is useful for big data analytics, machine learning, and media processing.
Data Residency: Meet data sovereignty or compliance requirements by keeping data within a specific country or on-premises location.
Modernizing On-Premises Applications: Migrate legacy on-premises applications to a modern, container-based architecture using Amazon ECS or EKS running on Outposts, without having to immediately move them to the cloud.

Monitoring and Management

Amazon CloudWatch: Collects performance metrics for resources running on the Outpost.
AWS CloudTrail: Captures all API calls made to services on the Outpost for auditing and security analysis.
VPC Flow Logs: Provides detailed information about network traffic to, from, and within your Outpost.
AWS Health Dashboard: Delivers notifications about the health and maintenance of your Outpost infrastructure.

Pricing

You purchase Outposts capacity (either Rack or Server) for a 3-year term, with options for All Upfront, Partial Upfront, or No Upfront payments.
In addition to the capacity charge, you pay for the AWS services (e.g., EC2, RDS) and any AWS Marketplace AMIs that you run on your Outpost, just as you would in the cloud.
Data transfer from your Outpost to its parent AWS Region over the service link is free.

AWS Outposts

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