AWS's new hybrid offerings

This year's AWS re:Invent event has been a blast. The keynote by AWS CEO Andy Jassy is very inspiring. Among the many new products and services announced, There is a couple of them that is showing the hybrid strategy that AWS is pushing forward.

As Andy quoted in the keynote, 96% of the global IT spending is still in on-premises data centres. I'm not sure if this number includes end-user computing devices, but that's still a large amount. There are reasons that businesses simply cannot migrate into the cloud, eg, compliance and latency, to name a few. So in reflection of one of the 10 principles Andy mentioned, "You can't fight gravity", AWS is bringing the cloud to on-premises.

AWS is doing this from both hardware and software perspectives.

Hardware

AWS already offer Outposts, which is a full 42U rack that gets deployed into physical data centres. It comes with more than a dozen configurations to suit different computing needs. This is already very popular among large organizations and landed in New Zealand earlier this year.

To make Outposts more accessible and appealing to organizations that do not have a full-rack requirement, AWS introduced 2 more Outposts form factors, 1U and 2U. Personally, I believe this will attract a lot more interest for Outposts and will potentially make organizations migrate all servers that do not need to remain on-prem to the public cloud while replacing existing hardware with these smaller Outposts to run applications that cannot. Another use case will be deploying them into traditional business premises, ie, offices and warehouses those are not data centres. The possibilities provided by these more agile form factors are limitless.

These will be available later in 2021 and we will be watching the development closely.

Software

If you want to use your existing hardware and do not want to invest in AWS Outposts, AWS offered another solution. ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere. These essentially extend the reach of ECS and EKS control plan into on-prem compute hardware. By installing the ECS agent or EKS distro into existing servers, you can use the same AWS ECS and EKS console to deploy applications that run on your own hardware in the same way you do in the cloud. If the application is already containerized (if not, why haven't you done so already?) then it should be very easy to deploy them on these platforms. Obviously, you probably cannot use some AWS specific features, for example, awsvpc networking driver and EFS support.

AWS also introduced the AWS EKS Distro. This distro is a set of software that makes up a fully functional Kubernetes platform. These software are the same versions used by AWS EKS. This way you can deploy a consistent Kubernetes environment that is the same as the EKS environment without worrying about version discrepancies, as your operating system of choice might provide different versions of the components and it could be a significant effort to keep them up-to-date. I believe the main purpose of this distro is to pave the way for EKS Anywhere, as you need to keep every component of the platform in sync to avoid any incompatibilities.

EKS Distro is available right now, while ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere will be coming in 2021.

Conclusion

It is very exciting to see the approach that AWS is taking to satisfy on-premises requirements. The benefit of the cloud is not just the cost savings for your infrastructure. You get the most value out of the agility and modern application operation practices associated with the cloud. By reaching beyond AWS's own infrastructure, AWS is bringing these values to the on-premises world.