In the blockbuster move, Amazon jumps into the data center with both feet

Amazon Web Services Inc., the king of cloud computing, has taken a giant step into the background of customer data centers.

At his re: Invent conference in Las Vegas, the cloud company Amazon.com Inc. ad Outposts, a on-site data center system based on the same hardware that AWS uses to run its own cloud. Customers will be able to order racks using the same material as AWS.

"The outposts will allow you to have on-site AWS hardware and services," AWS General Manager Andy Jbady said in his introductory speech on the outposts.

The outposts come in two variants. One is an extension of VMware Cloud on AWS, a two-year agreement with VMware Inc., the virtual machine giant, to run the company's infrastructure software on AWS. The new solution is the ability to run VMware virtual machines over outposts. The other option is a native AWS option allowing companies to run computing, database, machine learning and other AWS services in their own data centers.

In either case, said AWS, it will deliver the server, storage, and network racks to customers, install them if customers want, and manage their maintenance and replacement. Essentially, the outposts will be an extension of the Amazon virtual private network of a client, which allows businesses to use AWS resources in a virtual private network. Customers can connect from the outposts to the rest of their applications in AWS or any other AWS service. .

The number of AWS cloud services that Outposts offers is not yet defined, but not all at least at the beginning. "The IThe main objective is not to provide all the services on the outposts, "Jbady said at a press conference after the keynote address. The basic components that customers really want on site, consistent with the cloud, include computing, storage, machine learning, badytics, and more.

This decision represents another important step taken by Amazon to define the information technology market agenda (and to define a much broader element). All members of traditional vendors such as Oracle Corp., IBM Corp. and Dell Technologies Inc. compare to competing cloud providers such as Microsoft Corp and Google LLC. In particular, it comes up against similar solutions from Microsoft and Oracle that have their own limitations.

"The outposts could be the biggest announcement of the show as it is the first" official axis of the sea "with the hybrid cloud," said Patrick Moorhead, president and senior badyst. Referring to a service announced two years ago to physically transfer data between remote data centers and the cloud, he added: "Snowball was a niche, but Outposts is a common product.

While AWS clearly aims to help companies get rid of data centers, such as large customers such as Netflix Inc., the company is also aware that many large companies refuse or are unable to give up completely. their data centers. Some do not want to risk problems in the operation of the main applications for customers and employees, while others are constrained by the rules and regulations in force regarding the sovereignty and confidentiality of data.

In fact, the AWS move should not be a complete surprise. Over the past seven to eight years, the company has been providing more and more technologies to bring the cloud to the data center. For example, it offers services such as Virtual Private Cloud, Direct Connect, a private connection between local data centers and AWS, and Storage Gateway, which allows businesses to store data locally and load it asynchronously into the cloud.

"There will be workloads that [enterprises] need to stay put … because they require very low latency or have to run close to the factory, "he told SiliconANGLE last week. "What we hear from customers on a regular basis is that they would like to be able to leverage their existing on-premise data centers for which they are not ready to retire as transparently as possible with AWS in the cloud."

In fact, he said in the interview: "Everything is on the table so that we can take it into account. During our cycle of operations, which we have just repeated this year, we have been studying very seriously each year over the last five years, to do more things on site. "

Jbady also described why the cloud and premises are more transparent. "If you do something on custom hardware with a different order plan than the one you use in the cloud, on-premise, with different tools, and where the on-premise and cloud offerings are really different, the customers are really frustrated and there is not much value, "he said." Sounds good, but it does not work in practice. "

In any case, the new services are an important step forward in the two-year agreement between AWS and VMware Inc., which involves an alliance with the virtual machine manufacturer to enable its software running on AWS. "This has had a very strong resonance in the market very early, and the momentum is very strong for this offer," Jbady told SiliconANGLE.

Dave Vellante of sister market research company Wikicon, SiliconANGLE, said that Outposts would appeal to companies by allowing them to use the same hardware, the same tools, the same control plan and the other technologies that they have. AWS uses in its cloud. In this sense, it is the AWS version of Microsoft Azure Stack and Microsoft's Cloud at Oracle.

"AWS is becoming a de facto leader in the hybrid cloud," said Vellante. "The outposts are a deliberate effort to strengthen this leadership position. This means that AWS recognizes that hybridization is real, which was not obvious to AWS observers a few years ago. Customers with whom I have spoken under a confidentiality agreement are absolutely interested. "

The fundamental attraction, he added, is that "users want to integrate the cloud business model into their on-premise workloads." The outposts should do it better than anyone else because it is a solution entirely designed by Amazon as a cloud service. "

What distinguishes it from Azure Stack in the latter case is provided through partners such as Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., and Oracle Cloud At Customer, designed for Oracle workloads, "a lot more narrow in terms of use cases ".

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