AWS Outposts
AWS Outposts is an Amazon Web Services offering that supports a hybrid architecture, extending AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to data centers, co-location environments, and on-premises facilities.
Key points
- Hardware remains on premises while using the same AWS management and control-plane services as the cloud.
- Gives customers the ability to run AWS services on premises.
- Two form factors:
- Outposts servers — 1U (AWS Graviton2-based) or 2U (3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable-based) rack-mountable servers for sites with limited space or lower capacity needs; both fit a standard 19” EIA-310 rack.
- Outposts racks — an industry-standard 42U rack, deployable as a single rack or scaled to multiple racks; deployments of four or more compute racks require an ACE (Aggregation, Core, Edge) rack as a network aggregation point.
- Not every AWS service is available on both form factors — for example, Amazon EKS nodes, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3 on Outposts run on Outposts racks but not on Outposts servers.
- Shared responsibility: AWS still manages, monitors, and patches the Outposts hardware and firmware even though it physically sits on the customer’s site.
- Distinct from AWS Local Zones, which place AWS-managed infrastructure near population centers for low latency without requiring hardware on the customer’s own premises, and from AWS Snowball Edge, which is aimed at offline data transfer and edge compute rather than running the full AWS control plane on site.