Since its start, Amazon Web Services encouraged customers to go all-in on the cloud, but it made a big strategic adaptation last November when it announced AWS Outposts – which allows customers to run their applications not only on their cloud, but in their own legacy private data centers.
Notably, both Microsoft and Google Cloud have already stepped into this field. Microsoft has long promoted hybrid cloud with its Azure Stack product. As for Google Cloud, it launched its own offering, Anthos, earlier this year. On Tuesday at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced that Outposts is now generally available.
"Customers say, I love that I can use the same tools to manage on-premises infrastructure that makes it easier to move to the cloud," Jassy said onstage. "This was very much something we were thinking about over the last few years."
With AWS Outposts, customers can still use AWS's popular features in storage, analytics, and more on their private data centers. It comes in two variants: Native AWS, and VMware Cloud on AWS for customers who use want to use VMware's products with AWS.
"We're very excited to give this to you today," Jassy said.
With the general availability of AWS Outposts, now all three of the top clouds have hybrid cloud offerings. However, both Google Cloud and Microsoft take it a step forward by allowing customers to run their cloud services on rival clouds – including Amazon's.
Google Cloud's Anthos was launched with this premise, while Microsoft introduced Azure Arc in November. Similarly, Amazon has been slower to allow customers to use terms like "hybrid cloud" and "multi-cloud" at its conferences, while Google Cloud and Microsoft have embraced both strategies.
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