UPDATED 17:15 EDT / DECEMBER 10 2021

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Q&A: AWS is on the edge, and that’s where its customers want to be

A common Amazon Web Services Inc. tagline is that the company is “wherever its customers want it.” And increasingly, where customers want compute power is at the edge.

AWS Chief Executive Officer Adam Selipsky highlighted the company’s focus on edge computing in an interview with SiliconANGLE Media. And while at re:Invent, Amazon.com Inc. Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels announced that AWS was bolstering its edge portfolio with new Wavelength Zones and 30 new AWS Local Zones in 20 new countries.

This makes it no surprise that AWS’ edge computing strategy was the topic when George Elissaios (pictured), director of product management at AWS, spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. The following content has been condensed for clarity. (* Disclosure below.)

Furrier: People are just working out what edge computing is. So, will you explain how AWS defines its edge? And what should customers buy to make the edge work? 

Elissaios: For us, it is providing a breadth of services that our customers can either use holistically or combine. A really good example is DISH Wireless. I’m sure you know we’re building with DISH Network LLC the first-in-the-world 5G mobile network fully on cloud. This combines Outposts and combines Local Zones to distribute the 5G network nationwide. So, different parts of their applications live in different edges — the Local Zone, the Outposts and the region itself.

Local Zones are going to be in 45 cities in the world, but customers might still come and say, for example, “Oh, why are you not in Costa Rica?” Well, we will have Outposts in Costa Rica. So the customer could build their own offering there or could build on top of Outposts while distributing the rest of their workload in existing AWS offerings.

So to answer your question … there is no single answer. I think that it is per use case and per workload that customers are going to combine or choose which one to use.

Furrier: So, you’ve got Regions, Availability Zones and Local Zones. Can you take us through the topology of how these work?  

Elissaios: A Local Zone is a fully managed AWS infrastructure deployment. So it’s owned and managed and operated by AWS. And because of that, it offers you the same elasticity, and security, and all of the goodies of the cloud. But it’s positioned closer to your end customers or your own deployment. So it’s positioned in the local urban, metropolitan or industrial center closer to you.

So if you think about the U.S., for example, we have a few regions in the East Coast and in the West Coast. But now we’re extending these regions, and we’re bringing more and more services to 15 cities.

This enables customers to run the distributed cloud or distributed edge workloads that we’ve been hearing more and more about. Think of gaming, for example. We have customers like Supercell Oy that need to be closer to the gamers, wherever they are. So they’re going to be using a bunch of Local Zones to deploy. We also have these hyper-local use cases — for example, Netflix Inc. — that are enabling their creative artists in LA to connect locally and get as low as single millisecond latencies.

So the Local Zone is like an Availability Zone, but it’s closer to you. It offers the same scalability, the same elasticity, the same security, and the same services as the AWS cloud. And it connects back to the Regions to offer you the full breadth of the platform.

Vellante: So AWS’ edge strategy is essentially to bring the AWS cloud to where the customers are in instances where they either can’t move or won’t move their resources into the cloud, or there’s no connectivity? 

Elissaios: Right. I think that you’re pointing out a very important thing, which is the common factor across all of these offerings. It is the AWS cloud; it’s not a copycat of the cloud. It’s the same API. It’s the same services that you already know and use.

So the powerful thing here is that it’s the same compute that you know and love in the cloud. The same Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types, the Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, the Simple Storage Service (S3), or Relational Database Service (RDS) for your databases and Elastic MapReduce (EMR) clusters. You can use the same services and the compute is the same, all the way down from the hardware up to the service.

Vellante: Does AWS intend to push as many services as possible to the edge? 

Elissaios: We are pushing services according to customer requests, but also there is a nuance here. The nuance is that you push down the services that are truly latency-sensitive. You don’t need to push everything down to the edge. So when you’re doing monitoring and management, you don’t need these tools to be at the edge. Or batch processing doesn’t have to be at the edge because it’s by definition not online, not a latency-sensitive service.

We’re keeping those services in the region because that’s where customers really use them. But things like EC2, EBS, EMR, we’re pushing those to the edge because they are more latency-sensitive.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: AWS sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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