Highlights:

  • Amazon’s S3 is now available on AWS Outposts for consumers.
  • These Outposts are uploaded, managed, and monitored by AWS, “just like in the cloud.”
  • S3 on Outposts offers a novel Amazon S3 storage class, “S3 Outposts.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) declared its Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) availability for AWS Outposts consumers.

AWS Outposts is a hybrid IT service wherein consumers can run storage and compute on-premise, with configurable and fully-managed compute and storage racks developed with AWS-designed hardware. This service allows users to run workloads on-premises with similar AWS APIs (application program interface), tools, control plane, and hardware, thus allowing connection to other AWS applications.

These Outposts are uploaded, managed, and monitored by AWS, “just like in the cloud.”

The company recently announced that Outposts’ consumers could benefit from S3 APIs to retrieve and store data in a similar way to access or use data in a regular AWS region. This states that many utilities, tools, scripts, and apps that already use S3 APIs, either directly or via SDKs (Software Development Kits), can now be configured to store that data locally on a customer’s Outposts.

Outposts are linked to an AWS region; thus, one can access Amazon S3 in the AWS region. However, this update allows users of APIs to store data on the AWS Outposts hardware and process it locally.

AWS said, “The benefit to customers is a reduction in data transfers to AWS regions, as filtering, compression, or other pre-processing can be performed on data locally without having to send all of it to a region.”

“Speaking of keeping your data local, any objects and the associated metadata and tags are always stored on the Outpost and are never sent or stored elsewhere,” AWS added. “However, it is essential to remember that if you have data residency requirements, you may need to put some guardrails in place to ensure no one has the permissions to copy objects manually from your Outposts to an AWS region.”

S3 on Outposts offers a novel Amazon S3 storage class, “S3 Outposts.” Accordingly, all data stored is encrypted using SSE-S3, and optionally server-side encryption with a user’s encryption keys.

S3 on Outposts will offer users 96 TB or 48 TB of S3 storage capacity, with up 100 buckets on each Outposts.