This a) is not new, and b) is not unique. The other clouds have their equivalents: Azure Stack, Google Anthos/Distributed Cloud.<p>For most part, with any of these you get the steep pricing of cloud with the maintenance overhead, lack of flexibility and lengthy commitment periods of on-prem, meaning they're unlikely to be a sensible option unless you have regulatory requirements that force you into it. One use case is wanting to run the same cloud stack globally, but having a market where there is no local region and local law requires that data stay in country.
Outposts is certainly not a cheap solution, a dev rack with one m5.24xl is $124K, a similarly configured Dell server (but without the rack or AWS management) is less than half that price.<p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/</a><p>I didn't calculate to see if the bigger racks are more cost effective, but I'm guessing not if 5 m5.24xlarge, 4 c5.24xlarge, 3 r5.24xlarge costs $690K.
Not exactly the same, but the anywhere stuff (ECS etc) - I've found it pretty enjoyable to use. You basically can throw some beefy local servers into the pools and away you go with your standard jobs. When you need to maintain things locally, you can (usually) migrate loads pretty directly to an AWS region.<p>Pricing locally is really good in many cases vs AWS and the ECS Anywhere fees themselves for example are pretty modest. $8/month range per machine (which can of course host a fair bit).
So I must be missing something here. They drive to your workplace with a truck and drop off a bunch of servers and wires and stuff and get them all set up for you. Then you log into them and use the same APIs that you'd use if you connected to a normal AWS bucket? Why not just do the cloud server instead? Is this for people who have to move/store very large amounts of data such that transfer time is an issue? Or is it just a thing to let you not worry about sysadmin-type stuff because the Amazon dude does all of it for you?
This seems like it's available in surprisingly small increments, does anyone have pricing info? The public page easy to find has things for very different scales (at over 5k/mo to start).