AWS re:Invent Day 2 News Includes Highly Anticipated Outposts Release for Partners

AWS RE:INVENT — With 60,000 people gathered in Las Vegas this week for AWS re:Invent 2019, the cloud giant and its exhibitors and sponsors did not disappoint for news on the second day of the event.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy spent three hours on stage discussing the latest cloud trends, and making a flurry of announcements along the way. One of the biggest pieces of news for partners was the official unveiling of AWS Outposts, which Jassy first presented at last year’s re:Invent.

“I’m very excited to give this to you today,” Jassy said on Tuesday.

Outposts stands as AWS’ take on hybrid on-premises cloud equipment and service, all rented on an as-a-service basis. AWS delivers, installs and oversees the product set for organizations.

“We take care of monitoring, maintaining and upgrading your Outposts,” Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, wrote in a Dec. 3 blog. “All of the hardware is modular and can be replaced in the field without downtime. When you need more processing or storage, or want to upgrade to newer generations of EC2 instances, you can initiate the request with a couple of clicks and we will take care of the rest.”

AWS says Outposts features local processing and low latency, all from a single vendor.

“Everything that you and your team already know about AWS still applies,” Barr wrote. “You use the same APIs, tools and operational practices. You can create a single deployment pipeline that targets your Outposts and your cloud-based environments, and you can create hybrid architectures that span both.”

AWS connects each Outpost to a specific region and controls it from that data center. The region treats a collection of up to 16 racks at a single location as a unified capacity pool, Barr said. The collection can be associated with subnets of one or more VPCs in the parent region.

The Outposts hardware, meanwhile, is the same as what AWS uses in its data centers, with some additional security devices, Barr said. AWS delivers the equipment fully assembled.

Go to the AWS re:Invent blog to read all the news released so far. And in what has become tradition for Jassy, the keynote featured the re:Invent band covering artists including Van Halen, Queen, Billy Joel, The Proclaimers, The Doors and more, and tying excerpted lyrics to cloud issues and advancements.

Finally, a number of channel-friendly vendors also released their AWS re:Invent-related news on the second day of the event. Here’s a curated roundup of announcements.

Rackspace Expands Service Blocks

Rackspace on Tuesday announced expansions to its Service Blocks portfolio, which provide professional and managed services for AWS.

Channel partners now may offer:

• Container Services Journey — A combination of professional services, managed cloud and advanced Kubernetes management service blocks. Helps customers outline their container strategies, build containerized applications and transition them into ongoing management.
• Hybrid Transformation with VMware Cloud on AWS — A grouping of managed and professional services that give customers the tools and expertise to transition to hybrid cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS.
• Data Modernization — Helps customers streamline analytics processes, uncover deficiencies within those processes and interpret data to enable better business decisions.

“The new Service Block patterns consolidate …