(bright music) >> Welcome to this session of the AWS EC2 15th birthday event. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Meena Gowdar, the principal product manager for AWS Outposts at AWS. Meena, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Lisa. It's great to be joining here today. >> So you were the first product manager hired to lead the development of the Outpost service. Talk to us about back in the day. The vision of Outpost at that time. >> Yeah, Outpost vision has always been to extend the AWS experience to customers on premises location, and provide a truly consistent hybrid experience, with the same AWS services, APIs and suite of tools available at the region. So we launched Outpost to support customers' workloads that cannot migrate to the region. These are applications that are sensitive to latency, such as manufacturing, workloads, financial trading workloads. Then there are applications that do heavy edge data processing, like image assisted diagnostics and hospitals for example, or smart cities that are fitted with cameras and sensors that gather so much data. And then another use case was regarding data residency that need to remain within certain jurisdictions. Now that AWS cloud is available in 25 regions and we have seven more coming, but that doesn't cover every corner of the world, and customers want us to be closer to their end-users. So Outpost allows them to bring the AWS experience where customer wants us to be. To answer your question about the use case evolution, along the way, in addition to the few that I just mentioned, we've seen a couple of surprises. The first one is application migration. It is an interesting trend from large enterprises that could run applications in the cloud, but must first rearchitect their applications to be cloud ready. These applications need to go through modernization while remaining in close proximity to other dependent systems. So by using Outpost, customers can modernize and containerize using AWS services, while they continued to remain on premises before moving to the region. Here, Outpost acts as a launchpad, serving them to make that leap to the region. We were also surprised by the different types of data residency use cases that customers are thinking about Outposts. For example, iGaming, as sports betting is a growing trend in many countries, they're also heavily regulated requiring providers to run their applications within state boundaries. Outposts allows application providers to standardize on a common AWS infrastructure and deploy the application in as many locations as they want to scale. >> So a lot of evolution and it's short time-frame, and I know that as we're here talking about the EC2 15th birthday, Amazon EC2 Core to AWS, but it's also at the core of Outposts, how does EC2 work on Outposts? >> The simple answer is EC2 works just the same as Outposts does in the region, so giving customers access to the same APIs, tools, and metrics that they are familiar with. With Outposts, customers will access the capacity, just like how they would access them in an availability zone. Customers can extend their VPC from the region and launch EC2 instances using the same APIs, just like how they would do in the region. So they also get to benefit all the tools like auto-scaling, CloudWatch metrics, Flow Logs that they are already familiar with. So the other thing that I also want to share is, at GA, we launched Outposts with the Gen 5 Intel Cascade Lake Processor based instances, that's because they run on AWS Nitro Systems. The Nitro Systems allows us to extend the AWS experience to customers location in a secure manner, and bring all the capabilities to manage and virtualize the underlying compute storage and network capabilities, just the way we do that in the region. So staying true to that Outpost product vision, customers can experience the same sort of EC2 feature sets like EC2 placement groups on demand, capacity, reservations, sharing through resource access managers, IM policies, and security groups so it really is the same EC2. >> I imagine having that same experience, the user experience was a big advantage for customers that were in the last 18 months rapidly transforming and digitizing their businesses. Any customer examples pop up that to you that really speak to, we kept this user experience the same, it really helped customers pivot quickly when the pandemic struck. >> It almost feels like we haven't missed a beat Outpost being a fully managed service that can be rolled into customer's data center, has been a huge differentiator. Especially at a time where customers have to be nimble and ready to respond to their customers or end users. If at all, we've seen the adoption accelerate in the last 12 to 18 months, and that is reflected through our global expansion. We currently support 60 countries worldwide, and we've seen customers deploying Outposts and migrating more applications to run on Outpost worldwide. >> Right. So lots of evolution going on as I mentioned a minute ago. Talk to me about some of the things that you're most excited about. What do you think is coming down the pike in the next 6 to 10 months? >> We're excited about expanding the core EC2 instance offerings, especially bringing our own Graviton Arm processor based instances on Outposts, because of the AWS nitro systems. Most easy to instances that launch in the region will also become available on Outpost. Again, back to the vision to provide a consistent hybrid experience for AWS customers. We're also excited about the 1U and 2U Outpost server form factors, which we will launch later this year. The Outpost service will support both the Intel Ice Lake Processor based instances, and also Graviton Processor based instances. So customers who can't install and, you know, 42U form factor Outposts, can now bring AWS experience in retail stores, back office, and other remote locations that are not traditional data centers. So we're very excited about our next couple of years, and what we are going to be launching for customers. >> Excellent. Meena, Thank you for joining me today for the EC2 15th birthday, talking about the vision of outposts. Again, you were the first product manager hired to lead the development of that. Pretty exciting. What's gone on then the unique use cases that have driven its evolution, and some of the things that are coming down the pike. Very exciting. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa, >> For Meena Gowdar, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (bright music)