Amazon Web Services Inc. said today that its AWS Outposts hybrid cloud service is now available in seven new regions, including Canada, Bahrain, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Announced during the company’s re:Invent conference in late 2018, Outposts extends native AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS deployments to customers’ own data centers, effectively giving them an on-premises version of the AWS cloud. It’s somewhat similar to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Stack offering, which allows customers to run Azure cloud services within their own data centers.

With AWS Outposts, customers can run compute and storage on premise, with fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware. The service lets customers run workloads on-premises with the same AWS application programming interfaces, control planes, hardware and tools they use to connect with their other AWS applications.

The service currently supports an array of Amazon Ec2 instances for compute tasks, including C5, M5, R5 and G4, with and without local storage. It also provides access to AWS cloud services including Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS for containerized applications, Amazon EMR clusters for data analytics workloads and Amazon RDS instances for relational databases.

The fully managed offering now is available in AWS regions in Canada (Central region), the EU (London, Paris and Stockholm regions), Middle East (Bahrain) and Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore regions).

AWS positions Outposts as ideal for workloads that need low-latency access to on-premises applications or systems, local data processing or local data storage. This regional expansion allows customers to connect to the region closest to their data centers.

AWS said that for now it’s shipping, delivering and installing AWS Outposts server racks by itself, but eventually hopes for its partners to fulfill those tasks once everything has been fine-tuned.

Wikibon analysts Dave Vellante, James Kobielus and David Floyer discussed the potential impact of AWS Outposts with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, shortly after the service was announced:

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE