AWS Outposts gives you on-premises compute and storage that is monitored and managed by AWS, and controlled by the same, familiar AWS APIs. You may already know about the AWS Outposts rack, which occupies a full 42U rack.

Last year I told you that we were working on new sizes of Outposts suitable for locations such as branch offices, factories, retail stores, health clinics, hospitals, and cell sites that are space-constrained and need access to low-latency compute capacity. Today we are launching three AWS Outposts servers, all powered by AWS Nitro System and with your choice of x86 or Arm/Graviton2 processors. Here’s an overview:

You can create VPC subnets on each Outpost, and you can launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances from EBS-backed AMIs in the parent region. The c6gd.16xlarge model supports six instance sizes, as follows:

The c6id.16xlarge model supports all but the largest of the following instance sizes, and the c6id.32xlarge supports all of them:

Within each of your Outposts servers, you can launch any desired mix of instance sizes as long as you remain within the overall processing and storage available. You can create Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) clusters (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is coming soon) , and the code you run on-premises can make use of the entire lineup of services in the AWS Cloud.

Each Outposts server connects to the cloud via the public Internet or across a private AWS Direct Connect line. Additionally, each Outpost server supports a Local Network Interface (LNI) that provides a Level 2 presence on your local network for AWS service endpoints.

Outposts servers incorporate many powerful Nitro features including high speed networking and enhanced security. The security model is locked-down and prevents administrative access, preventing tampering or human error. Additionally, data at rest is protected by a NIST-compliant physical security key.

While I was writing this post, I stopped in to say hello to the design and development team, and met with my colleague Bianca Nagy to learn more about the Outposts server:

Ordering Outposts Servers
Let’s walk through the process of ordering an Outposts server from the AWS Management Console. I visit the AWS Outposts Console, make sure that I am in the desired AWS Region, and click Place order to get started:

I click Servers, and then choose the desired configuration. I pick the c6gd.16xlarge, and click Next to proceed:

Then I create a new Outpost:

And a new Site:

Then I review my payment options and select my shipping address:

On the next page I review all of my options, click Place order, and await delivery:

In general, we expect to be able to deliver Outposts servers in two to six weeks, starting in the first quarter of 2022. After you receive yours, you or a member of your IT team can mount it in a 19″ rack or position it on a flat surface, cable it to power and networking, and power the device on. You then use a set of temporary AWS credentials to confirm the identity of the device, and to verify that the device is able to use DHCP to obtain an IP address. Once the device has established connectivity to the designated AWS parent region, we will finalize the provisioning of EC2 instance capacity and make it available to you.

After that, you are ready to launch instances and to deploy your on-premises applications.

We will monitor hardware performance and will contact you if your device is in need of maintenance. We will ship a replacement device for arrival within 2 business days. You can migrate your workloads to a redundant device, and use tracking information & notifications to track delivery status. When the replacement arrives, you install it and then destroy the physical security key in the old one before shipping it back to AWS.

Outposts API Update
We are also enhancing the Outposts API as part of this launch. Here are some of the new functions:

ListCatalogItem – Get a list of items in the Outposts catalog, with optional filtering by EC2 family or supported storage options.

GetCatalogItem – Get full information about a single item in the Outposts catalog.

GetSiteAddress – Get the physical address of a site where an Outposts rack or server is installed.

You can use the information returned by GetCatalogItem to place an order that contains the desired quantity of one or more catalog items.

Things to Know
Here are a couple of important things to know about Outposts servers:

Availability – Outposts servers are available for order to most locations where Outposts racks are available (currently 23 regions and 49 countries), with more to follow in 2022.

Ordering at Scale – I showed you the console-based ordering process above, and also gave you a glimpse at the Outposts API. If you need hundreds or thousands of devices, get in touch and we will give you a template that you can fill in and then upload.

re:Invent 2021 Outposts Server Selfie Challenge
If you attend AWS re:Invent, be sure to visit the AWS Hybrid kiosk in the AWS Booth (#1719) to see the new Outposts Servers up close and personal. While you are there, take a fun & creative selfie, tag it with #AWSOutposts & #AWSPromotion, and share it on Twitter. I will post my three favorites at the end of the show!

— Jeff;

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