What is AWS Outposts?

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer premises. By providing local access to AWS managed infrastructure, AWS Outposts enables customers to build and run applications on premises using the same programming interfaces as in AWS Regions, while using local compute and storage resources for lower latency and local data processing needs.

An Outpost is a pool of AWS compute and storage capacity deployed at a customer site. AWS operates, monitors, and manages this capacity as part of an AWS Region. You can create subnets on your Outpost and specify them when you create AWS resources such as EC2 instances, EBS volumes, ECS clusters, and RDS instances. Instances in Outpost subnets communicate with other instances in the AWS Region using private IP addresses, all within the same VPC.

For more information, see the AWS Outposts product page.

Key concepts

These are the key concepts for AWS Outposts.

• Outpost site – The customer-managed physical buildings where AWS will install your Outpost. A site must meet the facility, networking, and power requirements for your Outpost.

• Outpost configurations – Configurations of Amazon EC2 compute capacity, Amazon EBS storage capacity, and networking support. Each configuration has unique power, cooling, and weight support requirements.

• Outpost capacity – Compute and storage resources available on the Outpost. You can view and manage the capacity for your Outpost from the AWS Outposts console.

• Outpost equipment – Physical hardware that provides access to the AWS Outposts service. The hardware includes racks, servers, switches, and cabling owned and managed by AWS.

• Outpost racks – An Outpost form factor that is an industry-standard 42U rack. Outpost racks include rack-mountable servers, switches, a network patch panel, a power shelf and blank panels.

• Outpost servers – An Outpost form factor that is an industry-standard 1U or 2U server, which can be installed in a standard EIA-310D 19 compliant 4 post rack. Outpost servers provide local compute and networking services to sites that have limited space or smaller capacity requirements.

• Service link – Network route that enables communication between your Outpost and its associated AWS Region. Each Outpost is an extension of an Availability Zone and its associated Region.

• Local gateway – A logical interconnect virtual router that enables communication between an Outpost rack and your on-premises network.

• Local network interface – A network interface that enables communication from an Outpost server and your on-premises network.

AWS resources on Outposts

You can create the following resources on your Outpost to support low-latency workloads that must run in close proximity to on-premises data and applications:

Resource type	Racks	Servers
Amazon EC2 instances – Launch an instance on your Outpost	Yes	Yes
Amazon ECS clusters – Amazon Elastic Container Service on AWS Outposts	Yes	Yes
Amazon EKS nodes – Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service on AWS Outposts	Yes
AWS App Mesh Envoy proxy – AWS App Mesh on AWS Outposts	Yes	Yes
Storage
Amazon EC2 instance block storage – Amazon EC2 instance store in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances and Amazon EC2 instance store in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances	Yes	Yes
EBS volumes – Launch an instance on your Outpost	Yes
Amazon S3 buckets – Using Amazon S3 on AWS Outposts	Yes
Analytics and Database
Amazon EMR clusters – EMR Clusters on AWS Outposts	Yes
Amazon ElastiCache instances – Using Outposts in the Amazon ElastiCache for Redis User Guide, Using Outposts in the Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached User Guide	Yes
Amazon RDS DB instances – Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts	Yes
Networking, AWS IoT, and Amazon Machine Learning
Amazon VPC – Subnets in AWS Outposts	Yes	Yes
Application Load Balancers – Subnets for your load balancer	Yes
AWS IoT Greengrass	Yes	Yes
Amazon SageMaker Neo	Yes	Yes

Pricing

You can choose from a variety of Outpost configurations, each providing a combination of EC2 instance types and storage options. The pricing for these configurations includes the EC2 instances and storage, plus delivery, and maintenance of the Outpost equipment. Rack prices include installation costs. You can also increase your compute and storage capacity over time by upgrading your configuration.

You purchase a configuration for a 3-year term and can choose from three payment options: All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront. If you choose the Partial option or the No Upfront payment option, monthly charges will apply. Any upfront charges apply 24 hours after your Outpost is installed and the compute and storage capacity is available for use. For more information, see the AWS Outposts pricing page.