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Outposts customers can now benefit from S3 services just like in an AWS facility.

AWS Outposts customers can now use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) APIs to store and retrieve data. Using S3, they can access or use data in the same way they would in a regular AWS Region. Users can configure the tools, apps, scripts, or utilities that already use S3 APIs to store that data locally on their Outposts.

Amazon’s S3 is an object storage service that offers scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Customers can use S3 to store and protect any amount of data. The service fits a range of use cases, ranging from websites, and mobile applications to IoT devices and big data analytics.

AWS Outposts is a hybrid cloud platform that was announced back in December. Outposts extends native AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS deployments to customers’ own data centers. Outposts effectively gives customers an on-premises version of the AWS cloud.

The service is comparable to Microsoft’s Azure Stack Hub. Azure Stack is a hybrid cloud platform that enables users to run Azure cloud services within their own data centers.

Delivering concrete benefits to AWS Outposts customers

In a blog post, Martin Beeby, AWS Technical Evangelist for the EMEA region explained the benefits of the new service.

“This new feature will allow you to use the S3 APIs to store data on the AWS Outposts hardware and process it locally,” wrote Beeby. “You can use S3 on Outposts to satisfy demanding performance needs by keeping data close to on-premises applications.”

“It will also benefit you if you want to reduce data transfers to AWS Regions, since you can perform filtering, compression, or other pre-processing on your data locally without having to send all of it to a region.”

Introducing S3 Outposts

S3 on Outposts provides a new Amazon S3 storage class, named S3 Outposts, which uses the S3 APIs. They redundantly store data across multiple devices and servers on Outposts. By default, they encrypt all stored data using server-side encryption with SSE-S3.

Customers can optionally use server-side encryption with their own encryption keys (SSE-C) by specifying an encryption key as part of their object API requests, according to AWS.

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