Outposts General Inquiry

Question

I'm trying to get some additional information on exactly how Outposts work.

We have a client who runs things very heavily on-premise and they are interested in doing a hybrid-cloud situation. They want to keep business critical stuff on-premise because they are concerned about the business impact of their network losing internet connection. Their on-premise is currently set up using a very large intranet, so the intranet losing internet connection is not exactly a show-stopper for them as far as running their business goes. My hope was that we could use Outposts in a way where we could deploy the bare minimum necessary infrastructure and scaling to keep their business hobbling along if the internet was cut out, but then properly scale in the cloud for the 99% of the time when that's not a problem. In ideal situations, the majority of the traffic would be routing to an AWS region.

My first question is: is that even how Outposts work? Is that something that can be achieved using Outposts?

That brings me to my second set of questions, which are: when an Outpost is set up, does the traffic get routed to AWS first, or to the Outpost first? Because, obviously, if an internet connection is required for Outposts to work, it doesn't solve our problem.

Lastly, is there some list of services which are supported on Outpost? Are we able to run serverless applications using Lambda and Step Functions in Outpost?

Answer

There are three use cases Outposts is primarily used to meet, latency sensitivity, local data processing, and data sovereignty. Local data processing by providing services VIA AWS services that run on an Outposts could be possible. However, Outposts requires a stable connection back to the AWS Region for control plane functions over the Service Link. EX: IAM rule/policies to validate an S3 put request. Outposts is not meant to operate in a disconnected state. If the use case is to provide core services internally when the internet connection is down and Outposts would be impacted during that outage we would need to look at some ways to engineer around that case or use another solution. Engaging your SA and an Outposts specialist is what I would recommend here.

As far as traffic routing, data plane traffic can route to the region or locally first, or various combinations, it's highly configurable using Layer 3 and BGP. Outposts has a construct called a Local Gateway (LGW) that is used for local network traffic to communicate to the Outposts instead of going to the region. But the control plane traffic does go to the Outposts first via the Service Link.

Here is a link for the services supported on Outposts. Lambda and Step Functions are not currently supported. 
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/outposts/latest/userguide/what-is-outposts.html

Outposts General Inquiry

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