AWS Outposts Reviews

We work for many customers but we have used the solution in two big deals involving financial services and retail. We moved the data of both customers from on-premise to the cloud with a lift and shift using Azure and AWS Outposts. We expanded the projects over a year and a half, and we used the solution to save around 30% of our customer operations costs with both customers.

The keys to success for the solution are the easy-to-use user interface and the fact that the development team really likes the platform. It's an easy platform to use when beginning new projects. The architect is the key to success in designing the process or the lift and shift.

The product needs more integration in our region. We have high telecommunication costs. The other problem is that it should locate the cost. We buy using American dollars, and the ingress and egress, the input and output, are high. We say that they make us dance here in Latin America to use the platform. Governance is a big problem. The key to success would be to have perfect governance. Then, smaller details could be improved to better the platform, but we can't use the platform if the cost is too high. It's about cost and use case. Not every project is a lift and shift. Over a short time, the cost of the cloud sounds good, but when we look at using it for a long time, the freedoms have a cost and we need to know exactly what we're getting when we are using the cloud. The platform needs to spend more time investing in strengthening its governance and information tools and consider the real needs of its customers.

I think I was one of the first partners in the cloud environment, and I have been using the solution for five or six years.

The scalability is good.

The stability is good.

The support is not so good. When we start support tickets with AWS, they have too many people that get involved with a response, and then it takes more time to find a solution. When I'm talking about Azure and Oracle support in comparison, they have more concentrated knowledge, so it only takes two or three steps until you get a response. With AWS, we have to deal with too many people and too many forums. At the end of the day, we find our own solution.

Negative

I would rate it as a medium in difficulty. I say that because some of our teams think that Amazon is the leader when it comes to the cloud. However, more people tend to like Azure and think it is easier to use.

Many people who work with my team and our customer's team said that the user interface from AWS is too complicated because you need to know how to drive in order to navigate the menus. Azure is more user-friendly, so when talking about the user interface, I think Azure is better.

The key to success in using this platform is in the engagement of the customer on both sides. Using AWS requires a lot of knowledge from the people and developers involved. I made a mistake in a project with AWS, and I think I needed to engage the project manager on the business side more in order to know more about KPIs. If you have a customer that has a good development team, you can use AWS more easily. If not, I think the best option is Azure. If you have a technical team but a customer-based database and only a few players and you need to see the cost of using storage and single infrastructure as a service, Oracle is a good option.

I would rate this platform an eight out of ten.

All of the features are similar. All the hybrid cloud solutions are the same as our own. We have a similar solution called ICDC Model 2020. They provide a limited set of cloud services dealing with itself. Because if you go to Amazon, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, or IBM Cloud, you will see a huge amount of functionality regarding compute network, storage, API tools, and so on. When we are referring to the hybrid cloud, they are limited by functionality. And almost all provide general services like compute storage, network, databases, but not all end Kubernetes. In Amazon's case, Elastic Cloud Services; EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service provide EBS.

If you compare with the full bundle of these services, you can see the difference. This is enough for these locations in private data centers. Because the main reasons why the customers want to have it on their side are for the low latency and the security of their critical data.

The pricing model needs improvement because right now it's very expensive. All of these solutions are very expensive and it prevents other customers or owners of data centers from buying it. For example, Alibaba Cloud provides something cheaper, but of course not on the same architecture. Sometimes it's hard to compare. But the current price is the main barrier for such players. That is why we provide our own open-source solution, which is much cheaper.

Outposts was first announced by Amazon at the end of November in 2018. It was announced at the AWS Reinvent Event. It is a pretty new market and there are only a few players in this market. At least at the beginning of this year, it was AWS Outposts, Azure Stack, and Google Anthos. Google provides Kubernetes services only, not a virtual machine like VMware does. And IBM provides the hybrid cloud strategy. They published a book for dummies, Hybrid Cloud Strategy for Dummies. 

Outposts is on the hybrid cloud. If you're a user of Amazon Web Services and you like the way they provide the services, but you want to make sure that all the services you order over the internet will be deployed in your data center and you want to keep having the same level of service which you used to have from Amazon, they created Outposts for this. 

Now you have the ability to go the same way to the Amazon console, aws.amazon.com, and order the service you like, virtual machines, or whatever. And now you have the possibility to deploy it directly in your data center, directly in your location, in your data center.

Their support is normal. There are some pretty good local support teams of big vendors and providers.

This is a very interesting product. In terms of technical innovation, I'd say it make sense. Especially for those who are very critical to the latency. There are some industries that are very dependent on latency. Even several seconds would be a problem for them. 

Banks or financial institutions never want to go to the public because it is a kind of paranoia for them because their data could be stolen somehow or could be stored somewhere. They would rather pay money to sleep well because their data is close to them in their buildings, which is surrounded by their military forces.

Well, it's a pretty new one, so I would rate Outposts a seven or eight out of ten because there are no limits. It is very new.

We primarily use Outposts for private cloud requirements and some kind of hybrid cloud.

Outposts allows you to isolate your private environment from the public cloud provider while enabling almost all the features that are available on public cloud services. That is the beauty of this service. It's an infrastructure that you can put in your data center and seamlessly connect to the public cloud.

Outposts supports elastic coordinator services, but not elastic container services, which is the native service for containers in AWS. That is something missing in this product.

Outposts is scalable in the way that its infrastructure allows you to grow. There are some limitations in the infrastructure itself, so you can scale to the upper limits of that infrastructure.

Outposts is tough to deploy and implement in your data center. There are lots of things you have to do, so the implementation is cumbersome for infrastructure engineers. 

The pricing of Outposts needs to be evaluated from the standpoint of what's cost-effective at your company: How are you going to use it? How much money will it save for your products or applications? Is it worth it?  I would say it's probably too expensive for small or medium-sized companies. However, big companies might find it to be highly cost-effective depending on their respective cloud strategies.

I rate AWS Outposts nine out of 10. It's a highly stable product that does what we need it to do.