The adoption of hybrid technologies continues to boom as businesses with legacy systems look to the cloud to take advantage of the powerful benefits that enable them to drive growth, foster innovation, and enhance the customer experience. Recent studies indicate that almost 95% of all enterprises are adopting some form of public cloud, and nearly 87% of those have a hybrid cloud approach as part of their strategy. While clearly enterprises are ready to embrace the cloud, many remain grounded in the reality that certain workloads need to remain on-premises for the foreseeable future.
As organizations continue to grapple with their hybrid strategy, AWS Outposts has emerged as a powerful hybrid enabler that can seamlessly extend your AWS footprint from on-premises to the cloud. Beyond your typical complex hybrid approach that often sees organizations forced to prioritize compatibility at the expense of leveraging the full potential of native cloud capabilities, AWS Outposts unlocks the power of the AWS-powered platform, regardless of location, for a truly consistent hybrid experience. We call this approach, “Hybrid 2.0,” and it’s being powered by the introduction of AWS Outposts.
Redefining Hybrid with AWS Outposts
As public cloud adoption has evolved, so have the approaches used for hybrid deployments. One of the most interesting developments in recent years is the global introduction of AWS Outposts, which was announced at the tail end of 2018.
To recap, AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends the AWS platform into virtually any datacenter location via a pre-built, pre-configured, consistent, and evolving hardware solution that seamlessly integrates into the global AWS footprint. AWS Outposts provides the same hardware platform, APIs, tooling, and services to your on-premises and cloud systems for a consistent hybrid experience.
This approach avoids past agnosticism to provide the benefits of a single cloud native AWS-powered platform to customers that need to remain on-premises due to latency, data sovereignty, or other legacy requirements. In some cases, customers may also choose to leverage AWS Outposts as a stepping stone to the cloud when their infrastructure is too complex and tightly woven to justify fracturing it at this point in time. AWS Outposts can give customers the opportunity to understand how to operate and maintain things in the cloud before going ‘all in’.
Cloud Native Anywhere
In the past, hybrid computing strategies focused on crafting complex, on-premise solutions to provide the elasticity of the public cloud, while also being compatible with ever-changing public cloud platforms. This often saw technology platforms reduced to the least-common-denominator to ensure robust compatibility, making the costly tradeoff to forgo the adoption of modern, cloud native technologies. For this reason, nearly 71% of enterprise applications still remain on-premise, often without any cloud-focused modernization opportunities.
AWS Outposts addresses these challenges head on by redefining hybrid computing through a modern, “cloud-native” lens. Customers can now develop once, and deploy in the AWS cloud or on-premises without having to rewrite applications. With AWS Outposts, you have the same hardware and software infrastructure and a consistent set of services and tools across your AWS cloud and on-premises environments to build and run modern, cloud native applications anywhere.
What’s Next?
As cloud ecosystems welcome a new wave of modern hybrid approaches, customers now have the option to build portable, automated, cloud-native solutions on-premises while getting used to new programming and management models, then move the infrastructure when they’re ready. If you’re interested in adopting AWS Outposts, it’s important to not only consider the requirements for implementation but also how AWS Outposts will fit into your larger AWS cloud migration journey.
If you’re interested in learning more about AWS Outposts or want to discuss whether it’s the right fit for your unique use cases, join Onica and AWS for our AWS Outposts webinar Hybrid 2.0: Cloud Native Anywhere Powered by AWS Outposts where we share some of the top considerations for your AWS Outposts adoption, as well as best practices for all aspects of your AWS Outposts migration project, pricing models, location, implementation, optimization, and beyond.
