AWS Outposts Reviews

Outposts is used for customers who want a closed environment. Even though AWS is a public cloud service, customers sometimes want AWS services in a private cloud setup. In such cases, we propose Outposts.

Outposts allows customers to compose the services they want in a private cloud-like style, which is an advantage. It includes features that allow connection only on-premises without any VPN connections or Direct Connect. 

Additionally, AWS can manage services when deployed on customer sites due to Outposts' capability of being installed in on-premises environments.

Outposts is not a simple solution to implement as it needs to be shipped from the US and involves high delivery costs and running costs. The product is heavy to ship and can be difficult to handle logistically.

We have dealt with Outposts, particularly for a customer located in Vietnam, and have delivered the solution.

Outposts is a very stable solution. AWS has designed it with redundancies and resiliency, meeting compliance levels with continued management of the components, thus ensuring reliability.

Scalability of Outposts is not straightforward. The current delivery model is a rack-style box, meaning if a customer wants to expand services, another unit must be ordered. This makes expansion not an easy process, earning it a rating of six or seven.

AWS support is excellent. All technical knowledge is well-documented, and we can search this documentation easily. If issues arise, they can be promptly addressed by raising a ticket and AWS support responds within SLA guidelines.

Positive

The initial setup involves significant coordination and verification of various technical prerequisites, managed by AWS engineers.

Installation is done by AWS engineers, while we are involved in gathering customer site information to facilitate their work.

Customers should consider the high cost, which can range from $10,000 to hundreds of thousands depending on the components.

I rate AWS Outposts a nine out of ten, indicating room for some improvement.

There are two crucial aspects that stand out when we talk about the use cases of AWS Outposts. First, the seamless and simplified process of migrating on-premises applications with their local dependencies to the cloud is a significant advantage. Second, the low latency it offers is a game-changer, especially in high-frequency businesses like trading or manufacturing setups.

The most valuable aspect is that it comes in a rack form factor which makes it incredibly easy to use and deploy various AWS services. You can start with foundational services like EC2, and then expand to container management with ECS and Kubernetes with EKS. You can also take advantage of EBS for storage needs, manage databases using RDS, and ensure load balancing with ALBs. It essentially brings a comprehensive range of AWS services to your on-premises environment in a convenient rack format.

There is room for improvement regarding its technical support services. Also, it would be beneficial if AWS allowed for more granular and customizable pricing options.

It provides good stability capabilities.

It is very scalable.

Overall, we have a positive experience with their customer support. They offer various resources like training, webinars, and more. Their support team is also distributed globally, covering different regions such as EMEA, APAC, Americas, and Australia. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward.

The initial setup for connectivity and infrastructure took a couple of months to complete. Once the infrastructure was in place, setting up specific features afterward was relatively quick, typically taking just a week or two. The maintenance and ongoing management require additional personnel to ensure everything runs smoothly over time.

The pricing structure could be more flexible. AWS typically offers enterprise contracts that span multiple years, which might not align with the needs of individual users who prefer shorter terms. While the longer-term pricing is suitable for enterprise contracts, it can be on the higher side, especially when organizations don't utilize all the services included in the bundles. I would rate it seven out of ten.

If you're in need of a hybrid cloud solution, I highly recommend AWS Outposts. It offers a strong balance of security and speed, and enables you to join the AWS marketplace, access their network, and take advantage of their extensive documentation. When it comes to pricing, it can be a bit more complex to manage cost-wise and you need to carefully assess which features you're using, and how much of them, and then place your order accordingly. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

When it comes to use cases, we break down customer requirements into various scenarios and aim to achieve them using the SaaS platform. Our use cases are primarily driven by the specific needs of each customer, which are project-dependent. For instance, certain projects may revolve around managing data for a waterboard or similar organizations, where content storage and accessibility are crucial. In such cases, we utilize public cloud solutions to store and publish content to different applications that need to be made public.

Where public accessibility is required, we employ public cloud resources, often allowing read-only access to the content. However, in some instances, where customers need in-depth technical information about functional devices, we provide restricted user access through AD integration. This involves creating applications on the SaaS platform and establishing access control rules. Regarding data storage, we ensure that data is stored in compliance with geographical regulations. For example, in European regions, data is stored within the European VPN for data protection and compliance. In cases where data confidentiality is paramount, customers opt for solutions like Azure Stack.

The most valuable aspect is its ability to provide interfaces for events. This is particularly important because it needs to seamlessly integrate with on-premises systems, like Outpost, while also connecting to cloud services. Additionally, there's another application, which I unfortunately forgot to mention, that leverages cloud services as well. The feature that allows for working online and offline is also impressive. When the talk is about working online, it means we can connect to live public services, which essentially involve utilizing cloud services. This alignment with Outpost is a particularly powerful and promising feature.

Providing online support has proven to be quite valuable. However, it's important to note that this isn't so much an improvement, but rather a standard practice for solutions like Azure Stack or AWS Outpost. Typically, the respective companies send their engineers for installation at the customer's premises, ensuring on-site support. I recall a similar instance when we requested on-site support for one of our locations in Hyderabad, and Amazon agreed to send their engineers to set up the solution in our office environment.

That said, in terms of potential improvements, it would be beneficial to have the option for capacity expansion. When customers opt for a solution like Outpost, they receive a fixed set of capacities in terms of storage, network, and hardware. As design engineers, it's crucial to consider use cases and plan for scalability and sustainability. Having the flexibility to extend these capacities could be valuable. Some engineers may not be aware of future needs, and if there's an opportunity to expand capacity without the need for additional functionality, it would be a helpful feature. This way, we can cater to various needs and ensure the solution remains adaptable in the long run.

I have been using AWS Outposts for six to eight months.

It is stable. 

As a designer, I have a good understanding of how user demands and capacity needs may evolve over time. This allows us to make informed predictions and plan accordingly. Scalability is a valuable feature because it allows us to accommodate potential increases in usage. This is particularly critical because once a system is hardware-constrained, extending it becomes challenging.

While scalability is a significant advantage for public cloud solutions, in the case of Outpost, cloud vendors can still offer technical support and provide insights into accessibility and scalability. They can inquire about potential future increases in demand to ensure that the hardware is adequately prepared to handle these developments.

When it comes to knowledge, the support teams from these vendors are indeed a valuable source of information. They possess in-depth knowledge about their products and can provide crucial insights when we engage with them for support. This knowledge transfer is highly beneficial for engineers and designers who need to make informed decisions regarding hardware choices. Support quality is commendable, and there are various support tiers such as Gold, Silver, and others, each tailored to specific needs. Depending on the project's requirements, these support tiers can be selected. Ultimately, the decision on which support level to choose should consider both the cost associated with resources and the level of support needed.

Neutral

While some projects are deployed on-premises, my primary focus lies in the cloud, particularly with Active Directory integration. We frequently opt for Azure Ready solutions, which allow us to manage user access effectively. Identity integration is a crucial aspect, especially during POCs, where we sometimes encounter unforeseen security vulnerabilities. Security is a major concern, as not all cloud users are fully confident in the platform's security. Interestingly, this isn't limited to smaller entities; even large corporations have experienced security compromises. Many times, these breaches involve unauthorized access to cloud resources, leading to unexpected billing charges. These incidents often stem from users creating and inadvertently making resources public. This results in substantial unexpected costs. Addressing this issue is crucial. Cloud service providers need to improve security measures and provide support that actively educates users about proper security practices. Such incidents are not isolated and occur even at the enterprise level, highlighting the need for enhanced security awareness and prevention measures.

I recall the installation process, and it was quite smooth. The technical support team was highly supportive, readily answering our questions and providing suitable solutions. Moreover, the online connectivity aspect was impressive. In comparison to Azure or AWS, there was a notable advantage in this regard.

At my company, we primarily use Outposts for sharing and running jobs on VMware. We offload operational workloads to the Outposts environment. All of our services need to be compatible with AWS Outposts.

This gives us more data center capacity and allows us to manage database solutions locally. One of the challenges we faced when moving to Outposts was that we had a separate rule or policy in the catalog. Because of this, we had to migrate all our previously created jobs from other regions in order to run them on Outposts.

While migrating to the cloud, we couldn't upload PII data to other cloud regions except for Malaysia due to Malaysian policies. So, migration is always challenging due to policy restrictions. At that time, we didn't have a data center in Malaysia. 

If we had to upload the PII data to the cloud, we had to mask it first, and the masking process was time-consuming and resource-intensive. It could take 40 hours to mask a particular field of the data. With Outposts, we could avoid this masking issue, giving us an advantage.

I like the graphic interface we can see in Outposts.

With AWS, we've had seamless integration and support for many of our applications.  Overall, the support from AWS has been great. Previously, we used a custom application to fetch financial information from tables using AWS functions. 

But with EMR, we need to write business-related queries specifically for the customer. If AWS had a more streamlined solution for this, it would be even more helpful. Aside from that, from an infrastructure point of view, the integration has been seamless.

It would be great if it could support Glue services. That could be a valuable addition.

Basically, I'm a data engineer, so I work primarily on writing code and scripts. I handle analytics and generate reports. There's a lot of overlap where AWS eventually plays into competing jobs, so it can get complex.

I have been using it for a year. 

It offers good performance. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. We had no issues. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

Scalability in Outposts can be a bit limited. There could be interference with support operations from my particular region. 

We have a data center, and the data control capabilities from that location in Malaysia might cause conflicts. We may not have the newest Outposts features, and our AWS setup was on Webex, so there might be compatibility reasons behind it.

The customer service and support are helpful.

Positive

We used another solution. 

The initial setup is okay. It requires us to work in a new environment. But, from the AWS side, they are helpful.

I would recommend using it. If their security policy prevents them from having data analyzed in a different region, then I recommend moving to Outposts.

It might be time-consuming to migrate to services like Glue. I'm mostly concerned about EMR compatibility. If they're sending business data or using data catalogs, that might be difficult.

Overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

We use AWS Outposts to configure security groups to allow inbound and outbound traffic on ports.

AWS Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and API to our on-premises data center or co-location facilities. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service where AWS takes care of the installation, configuration, and maintenance of the solution's hardware.

Depending on the installation process, we have found some bugs and issues with the solution when the same platform is not used.

I have been using AWS Outposts for three years.

Three people are using the solution in our organization.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

AWS Outposts is a cheap solution.

AWS Outposts requires a network connection to AWS for management purposes. It can be connected via AWS Direct Connect or VPN. The solution can be configured with one or more availability zones that provide fault tolerance in an on-premises environment. I would recommend the solution to other users.

The solution provides benefits like low latency access and data residency requirements, seamless integration, local processing for sensitivity workload, and hybrid cloud deployment.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We work for many customers but we have used the solution in two big deals involving financial services and retail. We moved the data of both customers from on-premise to the cloud with a lift and shift using Azure and AWS Outposts. We expanded the projects over a year and a half, and we used the solution to save around 30% of our customer operations costs with both customers.

The keys to success for the solution are the easy-to-use user interface and the fact that the development team really likes the platform. It's an easy platform to use when beginning new projects. The architect is the key to success in designing the process or the lift and shift.

The product needs more integration in our region. We have high telecommunication costs. The other problem is that it should locate the cost. We buy using American dollars, and the ingress and egress, the input and output, are high. We say that they make us dance here in Latin America to use the platform. Governance is a big problem. The key to success would be to have perfect governance. Then, smaller details could be improved to better the platform, but we can't use the platform if the cost is too high. It's about cost and use case. Not every project is a lift and shift. Over a short time, the cost of the cloud sounds good, but when we look at using it for a long time, the freedoms have a cost and we need to know exactly what we're getting when we are using the cloud. The platform needs to spend more time investing in strengthening its governance and information tools and consider the real needs of its customers.

I think I was one of the first partners in the cloud environment, and I have been using the solution for five or six years.

The scalability is good.

The stability is good.

The support is not so good. When we start support tickets with AWS, they have too many people that get involved with a response, and then it takes more time to find a solution. When I'm talking about Azure and Oracle support in comparison, they have more concentrated knowledge, so it only takes two or three steps until you get a response. With AWS, we have to deal with too many people and too many forums. At the end of the day, we find our own solution.

Negative

I would rate it as a medium in difficulty. I say that because some of our teams think that Amazon is the leader when it comes to the cloud. However, more people tend to like Azure and think it is easier to use.

Many people who work with my team and our customer's team said that the user interface from AWS is too complicated because you need to know how to drive in order to navigate the menus. Azure is more user-friendly, so when talking about the user interface, I think Azure is better.

The key to success in using this platform is in the engagement of the customer on both sides. Using AWS requires a lot of knowledge from the people and developers involved. I made a mistake in a project with AWS, and I think I needed to engage the project manager on the business side more in order to know more about KPIs. If you have a customer that has a good development team, you can use AWS more easily. If not, I think the best option is Azure. If you have a technical team but a customer-based database and only a few players and you need to see the cost of using storage and single infrastructure as a service, Oracle is a good option.

I would rate this platform an eight out of ten.

We primarily use Outposts for private cloud requirements and some kind of hybrid cloud.

Outposts allows you to isolate your private environment from the public cloud provider while enabling almost all the features that are available on public cloud services. That is the beauty of this service. It's an infrastructure that you can put in your data center and seamlessly connect to the public cloud.

Outposts supports elastic coordinator services, but not elastic container services, which is the native service for containers in AWS. That is something missing in this product.

Outposts is scalable in the way that its infrastructure allows you to grow. There are some limitations in the infrastructure itself, so you can scale to the upper limits of that infrastructure.

Outposts is tough to deploy and implement in your data center. There are lots of things you have to do, so the implementation is cumbersome for infrastructure engineers. 

The pricing of Outposts needs to be evaluated from the standpoint of what's cost-effective at your company: How are you going to use it? How much money will it save for your products or applications? Is it worth it?  I would say it's probably too expensive for small or medium-sized companies. However, big companies might find it to be highly cost-effective depending on their respective cloud strategies.

I rate AWS Outposts nine out of 10. It's a highly stable product that does what we need it to do. 

All of the features are similar. All the hybrid cloud solutions are the same as our own. We have a similar solution called ICDC Model 2020. They provide a limited set of cloud services dealing with itself. Because if you go to Amazon, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, or IBM Cloud, you will see a huge amount of functionality regarding compute network, storage, API tools, and so on. When we are referring to the hybrid cloud, they are limited by functionality. And almost all provide general services like compute storage, network, databases, but not all end Kubernetes. In Amazon's case, Elastic Cloud Services; EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service provide EBS.

If you compare with the full bundle of these services, you can see the difference. This is enough for these locations in private data centers. Because the main reasons why the customers want to have it on their side are for the low latency and the security of their critical data.

The pricing model needs improvement because right now it's very expensive. All of these solutions are very expensive and it prevents other customers or owners of data centers from buying it. For example, Alibaba Cloud provides something cheaper, but of course not on the same architecture. Sometimes it's hard to compare. But the current price is the main barrier for such players. That is why we provide our own open-source solution, which is much cheaper.

Outposts was first announced by Amazon at the end of November in 2018. It was announced at the AWS Reinvent Event. It is a pretty new market and there are only a few players in this market. At least at the beginning of this year, it was AWS Outposts, Azure Stack, and Google Anthos. Google provides Kubernetes services only, not a virtual machine like VMware does. And IBM provides the hybrid cloud strategy. They published a book for dummies, Hybrid Cloud Strategy for Dummies. 

Outposts is on the hybrid cloud. If you're a user of Amazon Web Services and you like the way they provide the services, but you want to make sure that all the services you order over the internet will be deployed in your data center and you want to keep having the same level of service which you used to have from Amazon, they created Outposts for this. 

Now you have the ability to go the same way to the Amazon console, aws.amazon.com, and order the service you like, virtual machines, or whatever. And now you have the possibility to deploy it directly in your data center, directly in your location, in your data center.

Their support is normal. There are some pretty good local support teams of big vendors and providers.

This is a very interesting product. In terms of technical innovation, I'd say it make sense. Especially for those who are very critical to the latency. There are some industries that are very dependent on latency. Even several seconds would be a problem for them. 

Banks or financial institutions never want to go to the public because it is a kind of paranoia for them because their data could be stolen somehow or could be stored somewhere. They would rather pay money to sleep well because their data is close to them in their buildings, which is surrounded by their military forces.

Well, it's a pretty new one, so I would rate Outposts a seven or eight out of ten because there are no limits. It is very new.