This service is all about hybrid functionality, helping your align your applications and infrastructure from your on-premises environment with that of the AWS cloud. There are many reasons that organizations use a hybrid cloud mode, utilizing services from both public cloud providers and also their own local data centers. For example, they might need to run applications locally due to latency, security or even governance requirements. AWS understands this and, as a result, they've developed AWS Outposts. 

With AWS Outposts, it's now possible to bring the AWS cloud to your data center. This includes the same hardware used by AWS within their data centers. By bringing in AWS hardware to your data center, it allows you to use native AWS services, including the same tools and APIs as you would when running your infrastructure within AWS, the difference being is that the hardware and services will be running locally to help you maintain the need for local applications and workloads, et cetera. 

There are two different options available when using Outposts. You can either use VMware on AWS, which will seamlessly run your existing VMware management and infrastructure, or you can use a native AWS variant, which means you can use the same APIs and management tools as you would in AWS but on premises. For those new to VMware Cloud on AWS, it is sold as a service by VMware that allows you to run your applications across VMware's vSphere suite of products within a software-defined data center, hosted on top of the AWS public cloud. By utilizing VMware underlying cloud foundation, it provides the ability to give you access to many native AWS services and features. Couple this with the ability to continue managing your infrastructure with vSphere, vSAN, NSX and vCenter Server, it enables you to create a secure, flexible and scalable hybrid cloud infrastructure model for your organization. By bringing the same native AWS tools, API, management console and services to your on premises data center, it enables you to manage and implement a hybrid cloud approach with seamless migration abilities, burst capacity and management between local an AWS cloud environments. 

To use and organize AWS Outposts for use in your data center, you can order them through the AWS Management Console where you can select the different compute and storage options available to you. Depending on how much hardware you need, you can simply order a single server or variants of rack sizes, including a quarter or half or full-size racks of equipment. From a technical perspective, there are a wide number of EC2 instances available at launch. For example, C5, M5, R5, as well as storage options for EBS volumes, local instance storage and local disk options. AWS Outpost at launch and in the coming months will allow you to run services such as EC2, EBS, RDS, ECS, EKS, Sagemaker and EMR. From a connection perspective, customers can make use of the PrivateLink gateway endpoint to securely and privately connect in resources to others, including Amazon S3 and DynamoDB. 

One final point on AWS Outposts is that the service itself is fully managed. This means that you do not need to maintain a level of patch management across your infrastructure. AWS will ensure the infrastructure is patched as and when needed. 

That brings me to the end of this lecture. Next I'll be discussing AWS License Manager.