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.

• Outpost racks  

  • A 42U rack that includes rack-mountable servers, switches, network patch panels, power shelves, and blank panels.

  • 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.

  • 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.

• 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.

AWS Outposts Pricing

• You are charged for Outposts rack capacity for a 3-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