AWS Outposts Will Be Sold Through AWS And VMware Partner Network

Amazon Web Services for the first time will bring its industry leading cloud infrastructure on-premises by selling integrated hardware racks that can run native AWS or VMware environments -- and it will be available through the AWS and VMware partner network.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger joined AWS CEO Andy Jassy during a keynote at the AWS re:Invent conference Wednesday to unveil the hybrid cloud product marking Amazon's foray into the corporate data center. The general availability of AWS Outposts won't come to fruition until the second half of 2019.

“We’ll make it available through our respective partner programs and fuse those together,” said Gelsinger in a Q&A session after the keynote with Jassy.

AWS Outposts, the on-premises solution, comes in two variants: AWS Native and VMware Cloud on AWS.

[Related: AWS Launches On-Premises Hardware Alongside VMware]

Amazon will deliver, install and do maintenance and repairs on both options for Outposts, which should hit market next year, Jassy said.

The AWS-native solution offers the same APIs and control plane AWS customers are familiar using for their cloud-based workloads.

VMware worked closely with Amazon to build the VMware variant, offering the same core components of VMware Cloud on AWS: vSphere compute virtualization, NSX virtual networking, and vSAN virtual storage.

VMware also has developed a solution to complement the AWS-native version of Outposts, Gelsinger told re:Invent attendees.

The virtualization leader and AWS partner of late will bring to market VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2, integrating into the AWS stack VMware's vision for "that complete software defined data center," Gelsinger said.

The AWS-integrated VMware Cloud Foundation can be a "perfect wrapper" around the AWS-native version of Outposts, Gelsinger said, by adding NSX networking, as well as solutions like AppDefense for security and vRealize for automation.

Jassy said AWS' first true data center product was born from the recognition that customers see many workloads "that are going to live on-premises for a very long time" and want those workloads to seamlessly interact with the rest of the services AWS offers in the cloud.

AWS started thinking about that problem with an offering called Farzones that would meet some of the needs of customers that wanted some infrastructure to be deployed at far-flung outposts.

But as AWS leaders brainstormed, the more-comprehensive offering came out of a breakthrough earlier in the year while working with a single customer trying to get on-premises compute and storage connected with rest of AWS cloud, Jassy said.

Gelsinger said cooperation on Outposts stemmed from joint work developing Amazon RDS (Relational Database Services) in VMware, which brought Amazon's popular database service to VMware Cloud on AWS environments.

The two CEOs presented the offering as an extension of their partnership that yielded VMware Cloud on AWS.

"We're now rolling out globally at a very aggressive pace," Gelsinger said of the hybrid cloud service they brought to market more than a year ago

Gelsinger said VMware is committed to providing availability for VMware Cloud on AWS in every region where AWS operates.

“We’ll make it available through our respective partner programs and fuse those together,” Gelsinger said.