AWS Outposts Cheat Sheet

• A managed service that brings AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to the customer’s premises.

Concepts

• Outpost site is a physical location where AWS will install your Outpost.
• Outpost configurations include EC2, EBS, and networking capabilities. Each configuration has its own requirements for power, cooling, and weight support.
• The compute and storage resources are called Outpost capacity.
• You must have Outpost equipment to use the AWS Outposts service. This includes AWS-managed racks, servers, switches, and cabling.
• Supports asset-level capacity management, allowing visibility and management of EC2 capacity per Outpost rack or server.

Outpost racks  

• A 42U rack that includes rack-mountable servers, switches, network patch panels, power shelves, and blank panels.
• Supports second-generation Outposts racks with newer EC2 instance families, improved performance, and updated networking architecture.
• Using an Outpost subnet, you can launch EC2 instances and EBS volumes.
• Supports EBS snapshots on Outpost.

Outpost servers 

• A 1U or 2U server that provides local compute and networking services.
• You can launch EC2 instances that use instance store.
• EC2 instances can boot from external storage arrays using supported storage protocols.
• Back up instances to Amazon EBS in the AWS Region using EBS direct APIs.
• Service link allows communication between Outpost and associated AWS Region.
• An Outpost is an extension of an AWS Availability Zone and associated Region.

Local gateway

• Allows communication between an Outpost rack and on-premises network.

Components:

• Route tables
• Virtual interfaces
• It also serves as a target in your VPC route tables for on-premises traffic and performs NAT for instances with addresses from your customer-owned IP pool.
• Each Outpost rack supports one local gateway.
• With AWS RAM, you can share the local gateway route table with other AWS accounts or organizational units.
• A local network interface allows communication between an Outpost server and an on-premises network.
• Service link connectivity can be configured using AWS Direct Connect transit virtual interfaces.

Outpost sharing

• Enable Outpost owner to share Outposts and Outpost resources with other AWS accounts in the same AWS organization.
• Owners cannot modify instances that AWS accounts launch into Capacity Reservations.
• AWS accounts are not allowed to view or modify resources owned by other consumers or the Outpost owner.
• You can share Outpost resources to AWS accounts, organizational units, or entire organizations in AWS Organizations.

AWS Outposts Monitoring

• You can use Amazon Cloudwatch to retrieve Outposts metrics.
• To capture API actions from services on an Outpost, you can use AWS CloudTrail.
• Use VPC Flow Logs to get detailed information about traffic to and from your Outpost, as well as traffic within your Outpost.
• You can also use Traffic Mirroring for content inspection, threat monitoring, troubleshooting, or copying and forwarding network traffic.
• To see changes in the health of AWS resources, you can use AWS Health Dashboard.
• Additional CloudWatch metrics are available for virtual interface connection status and BGP session state.

AWS Outposts Pricing

• You are charged for Outposts rack capacity for a 3-year or 5-year term: All, Partial, or No Upfront.
• You are charged for the following:
  • AWS services running on Outposts
  • AWS Marketplace AMIs
  • Outposts and Outpost resources that you share
  • Data transfer associated with Outpost’s service link VPN traffic from AWS Region
• You are not charged for data transfers from Outpost to the parent AWS Region.

AWS Outposts Cheat Sheet References:

https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/outposts/latest/userguide/what-is-outposts.html