ESG's Edwin Yuen discusses the significance of the AWS Outposts announcement.
Announcer: The following is an ESG on location video.
Edwin: Hi, I'm Edwin Yuen, ESG Senior Analyst for Cloud Services and Orchestration and DevOps. And I am here in the AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas, truly massive show that spans six hotels across the city.
So we've been told there's 53,000 attendees and partners, and that's a significant jump from the 40,000 they had even in 2017. Now, in my preview video, I talked about a lot of different potential items that we would have here: hybrid cloud, containers, and serverless. But I think the biggest news to land, the splash news is really about hybrid cloud.
I think some of us had expected an expansion of things like Snowball Edge. We did see a Snowball Edge that has a lot more compute in it, a little bit less storage, really a lot about running more workloads near the on-premises areas, not just in the cloud. But the big announcement is really from AWS Outposts, which is going to be the full AWS cloud, on premises, as a service, in customer data centers.
Now, this solution's going to have a couple of different options. It will have a solution that's going to match up with the VMware cloud on AWS solution that they announced a couple of years ago that's been growing in popularity and that's available. But the other solutions is going to be pure AWS. It's going to be AWS custom hardware. It's going to be AWS software. The same hardware, the same software that runs in the public cloud, but now, it's going to be on the customer premises, it's going to be fully managed by AWS, they're going to take care of everything there.
You'll get compute and storage on premises, but most importantly, all the connections, all the connectivity, all the APIs then connect right back to the core AWS public cloud. You get a full set of services. Every time new services are introduced, you have access to them on premises. So if you have latency issues, if you need to have servers on premises, this is a great opportunity, a true hybrid cloud, bringing that public cloud down to the on-premises, what I call the cloud down hybrid cloud.
This is something that customers had been demanding and really asking for since public cloud came down, how can I take that public cloud and bring it on premises? And AWS has announced exactly that for those customers. So it's a very groundbreaking announcement, I think, for hybrid cloud. It really shows that hybrid cloud is not just about extending into the cloud, it's truly about bringing the cloud down to the on-premises and extending the public cloud to the local data centers.
And it's a really exciting announcement. We're going to get some more details from AWS in the future, but this is something that I think that most hybrid cloud customers want to look into, anybody who uses AWS will want to look into, and anybody who's really considering any sort of public cloud services and needs them on premises should look to AWS and what they're going to offer going forward.