Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new generation of its AWS Outposts rack offering.
AWS Outposts is an on-premise offering that was first launched in 2018.
The new AWS Outposts racks support AWS' seventh-generation x86-powered Amazon EC2 instances, beginning with the C7i compute-optimized instances, M7i general-purpose instances, and R7i memory-optimized instances.
According to the cloud company, the instances deliver twice the vCPU, memory, and network bandwidth while providing up to 40 percent better performance compared to C5, M5, and R5 instances on previous generation Outposts racks.
Powered by fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, AWS says that the new Outposts racks are ideal for "a broad range of on-premises workloads requiring enhanced performancem such as larger databases, more memory-intensive applications, advanced real-time big data analytics, high-performance video encoding and streaming, and CPU-based edge inference with more sophisticated ML models."
The company plans to add support for more EC2 instances, including those enabled by GPUs, in the near future.
In a blog post, AWS explains that it has made the networking in the latest generation "simpler and more scalable than ever" with a new Outposts network rack.
The new design enables customers to scale compute resources independently from networking infrastructure and makes it easier for customers to connect their on-premises environment with AWS Regions. "You can configure everything from IP addresses to VLAN and BGP settings through straightforward APIs," the company wrote in the post.
In addition, AWS is introducing a new category of Amazon EC2 instances on Outposts racks with "accelerated networking." The company says this category is purpose-built for latency-sensitive, compute-intensive, and throughput-intensive workloads on premises, featuring a secondary physical network with network accelerator cards connected to top-of-rack (TOR) switches as well as the Outpost logical network.
One of the new instances is the bmn-sf2e, which runs on Intel Sapphire Rapids processors, and offers 3.9 GHz sustained performance across all cores and 8GB of RAM per CPU core. They also feature AMD Solarflare X2522 network cards that connect to the TOR switches.
The blog post notes that this offering would be well-suited to financial services customers, particularly capital market firms.
A second new instance type - bmn-cx2 - is designed for high throughput and low latency. The bmn-cx2 features Nvidia ConnectX-7 400G NICs physically connected to high-speed top-of-rack switches, and up to 800 Gbps bare metal network bandwidth.
At launch, the new generation of Outposts can be shipped to customers in the US and Canada, and can connect to six AWS Regions, including US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU West (London and France), and Asia Pacific (Singapore). More locations will later be added.
The new generation of Outposts follows AWS' news earlier this year that it was launching Outpost racks and servers specifically for telecommunications customers.
Known customers of AWS Outposts include FanDuel, Vapor IO, and Edge UOL.
