'It's a huge move from AWS' - hybrid offering Outposts arrives in the UK
Paris, Stockholm and London regions launched
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Outposts in seven new regions, including the UK.
The cloud giant launched the on-premise offering in the US at the end of last year, having first teased it at the end of 2018.
Outposts runs in a customer's or partner's datacentre and links to AWS' public cloud, running on the same hardware that AWS uses in its own facilities.
The on-prem solution is now available to link to AWS' London datacentre region, as well as regions in Paris and Stockholm. The Frankfurt and Ireland regions have already launched, as have other regions globally.
It can be shipped and installed in any EU country, as well as in Switzerland and Norway.
The European launch is supported by five partners: Cloudreach, Contino, Linke, Reply and Version 1.
Chris Bunch, general manager for AWS at Cloudreach, said he has already seen interest for Outposts in three particular use cases.
The first is organisations that have committed to running a hybrid model; the second is where data needs to be stored in a specific country; and the third is to address latency issues, particularly if a connection to the public cloud is not strong enough.
"Some workloads in some countries might need to stay on-premise and if you're going to stay on-premise then wouldn't life be convenient if you were using something that looks and feels the same there as in the cloud, with the same interface," he said.
"We've also had some enquiries from people looking at it from a latency perspective - people who need to be close to a particular network point, or in some cases are out at sea.
"It might be that they need to be close to an access point for running a sensitive financial application, or at the other end of the spectrum they're on an oil rig and the connectivity to get out to the public isn't very good."
Despite the use cases, Bunch said that he expects Outposts to be predominately a stepping stone towards the public cloud, rather than a huge revenue generator in its own right.
However, he said that the launch of an on-prem offering marks a big step for AWS, with the vendor managing the deployment and installing the hardware - although partners will deliver some of the services involved, he added.
"It's definitely a huge move for AWS," he said.
"They're usually either manufacturing and shipping hardware or in some cases putting their software onto somebody else's hardware, so this is a very different move from them away from the public cloud.
"But they have their own professional services team that can do it and their professional services grow in pretty much every country year on year.
"It's just a recognition that not everyone can go all-in yet. If you're a start-up, you're not going to touch this stuff because you'll go to the cloud from the ground up, but if you're an established business, there are use cases where people can't go all in. What Amazon wants is for that to not be a blocker for adoption."