Just a few years ago you’d have to search hard to find any mention of the word “hybrid” in Amazon Web Services Inc.’s official communications.

But Andy Jassy’s keynote at re:Invent 2019 made it obvious that the company was building a hybrid strategy, whether they used the word or not. Central to that pivot was the expansion of AWS’ Outposts portfolio, and today the company makes no bones that hybrid has been the goal of Outposts all along.

“Outpost’s vision has always been to extend the AWS experience to a customer’s on-premises location and provide a truly consistent hybrid experience with the same AWS services, APIs and suite of tools available at the region,” said Meena J Gowdar (pictured), principal of product and business development for edge computing infrastructure at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Gowdar spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. They discussed the evolution of AWS Outposts and how some unusual use cases have influenced the development of the product portfolio. (* Disclosure below.)

Outposts aids iGaming industry, makes legacy modernization easier

As the first product manager hired to lead the development of the Outposts service, Gowdar has been in the driver’s seat as the portfolio has expanded worldwide. Now, with the addition of the pizza-box-sized form factor Outposts 1U and 2U, due to be released this year, Outposts will be available for smaller and more remote locations that were not able to accommodate the larger 42U rack. This, along with the addition of Wavelengths, Local Zones, is all part of the plan to bring the AWS experience where customer wants us to be,” Meena stated.

Outposts was specifically developed to support workloads that customers were not able to migrate to AWS’ regional data centers. These include latency-sensitive manufacturing and financial trading workloads, applications that do heavy edge data processing, such as image-assisted diagnostics in hospitals or smart cities that collect data from hundreds of cameras and sensors. Outposts also allows companies that manage sensitive data to comply with data residency regulations by keeping the data within a specific jurisdiction or locality. But, like all technology, innovative customers use Outposts in ways that AWS never expected.

“We were surprised by the different types of data residency use cases,” Gowdar said.

With the growth of the sports betting industry, many iGaming companies are choosing Outposts because they are bound by regulations that require them to run applications within specific geographic boundaries. AWS makes this simple.

“Outposts allow application providers to standardize on a common AWS infrastructure and deploy the application in as many locations as they want to scale,” Gowdar said.

Another unexpected use case has become popular with legacy companies that need to rearchitect their applications on-prem before migrating to the cloud.

“To be cloud-ready, these applications need to go through modernization while remaining in close proximity to other dependent systems,” Gowdar said.

By first migrating to Outposts, companies can modernize and containerize using AWS services before migrating applications to their closest AWS Region, Gowdar explained.

“Here, Outposts acts as a launchpad serving them to make that leap,” she said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. Neither AWS, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE