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AWS Outposts, the hybrid cloud platform of Amazon, now also supports AWS Relational Database Service. This allows customers to create RDS database instances in their own on-premise data centers.

By supporting the database instances in the on-premises environment, the hybrid cloud platform gets a significant increase in functionality. AWS Outposts enables companies to run native AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS in their own data centers. This gives them an on-premise version of the AWS Cloud.

This way, companies can run compute and storage on-premise in combination with managed and customizable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware. The hybrid cloud platform allows customers to run workloads in their own data centers using the same AWS APIs, control planes, hardware and tools they use to connect to other AWS applications.

Workloads for AWS Outposts

As a result, customers are able to primarily run workloads that require low-latency, local data processing or local data storage. Or in the case of the newly presented database-as-a-service solution, running real-time databases. For example, databases based on IoT data in industrial environments.

Two important relational databases

Supporting AWS Relational Database Service on the AWS Outposts platform gives customers access to two important relational databases: MySQL 8.0.17 and PostgreSQL 12.2. This allows users to easily launch, run and expand relational databases. Without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure and overhead.

Limitations and Expectations

According to analysts, there are a number of things that users need to keep an eye on in order to use the new service. For example, AWS Outposts still lacks the option to store all data locally and the hybrid cloud platform cannot replicate or manage data for disaster recovery and high availability across multiple regions. This is because all data, and backup and restore options are only available in the specific AWS region to which the on-premise hybrid cloud platform is connected.

However, this will be changed in the near future. It is also expected that more databases than the two mentioned will soon be available within the AWS Relational Database Service.

Competition

AWS is not the only cloud provider offering database-as-a-service in the on-premise data center. Oracle also has a similar service with the Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer Service. Analysts indicate that the availability of AWS Relational Database Service for AWS Outposts will contribute to making this hybrid cloud platform more competitive with Microsoft Azure Stack, Oracle Cloud at Customer and Google Anthos.