By AWS Outposts has emerged as a compelling hybrid cloud solution, promising to bring public cloud capabilities directly into enterprise data centers. But for organizations running business-critical applications like SQL Server, Oracle, or SAP, the “plug and play” perception of AWS Outposts can lead to costly availability gaps.
Dave Bermingham, Senior Technical Evangelist at SIOS Technology, recently shared insights into the real-world architectural challenges of implementing high availability on AWS Outposts—and why traditional clustering remains essential for mission-critical workloads.
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The AWS Outposts Promise vs. Reality
“AWS Outposts is Amazon’s way of bringing the cloud closer to you. It’s real AWS hardware that resides in your data center, branch office, or facility, but it runs the same AWS services, APIs, and tools you would use in the cloud,” Bermingham explains. From a user perspective, it functions like another availability zone in your VPC, except it’s sitting on-premises.
“However, one of the biggest misconceptions about Outposts is treating it as a complete turnkey solution. While AWS manages the hardware and services, you’re still responsible for the physical environment—things like power, cooling, and networking,” Bermingham notes. “Another misconception is that you can treat it exactly like a full AWS Region. It’s close, but there are limitations, especially when it comes to capacity and service availability.”
Industries Driving Outposts Adoption
Outposts adoption is particularly strong in sectors where latency, data residency, or local processing requirements are non-negotiable. Healthcare organizations need to store sensitive data on-site for compliance while maintaining quick access. Manufacturing facilities depend on ultra-low latency for real-time automation and monitoring systems. Retail operations require point-of-sale systems that continue functioning even during network connectivity issues.
Financial services, media, and telecommunications companies are also leveraging Outposts when they need local infrastructure that still provides cloud-native capabilities.
The High Availability Challenge
For business-critical applications, ensuring high availability on Outpost requires planning across multiple layers: hardware, networking, and application architecture. The challenge becomes more complex when organizations realize that Outposts represents a single point of failure—essentially one availability zone.
“Since Outpost is a single rack or even a single server, you’ve got the plan for what happens if that entire footprint becomes unavailable, whether it’s power failure, connectivity issue, you name it,” Bermingham explains.
This is where clustering technology becomes crucial. “With SIOS, you can build high availability clusters that span different Outposts in different locations, or even between an AWS Outposts rack and an AWS Region,” he says. “That means if one Outpost goes down, which is essentially an availability zone, your app could fail over seamlessly without users noticing.”
The SIOS approach is particularly valuable because it doesn’t require shared storage, fitting perfectly with the storage-less architecture common in Outpost environments.
Hybrid Cloud Migration Patterns
Most enterprises take a phased approach to hybrid cloud adoption, starting with workloads running fully on-premises before moving them into Outpost. This strategy allows organizations to leverage cloud tools and automation without immediately migrating everything off-site.
“It’s kind of like putting one foot in the cloud while keeping the other on solid ground,” Bermingham explains. Once applications are stable on Outposts and the organization builds confidence, the final migration to the full public cloud becomes significantly easier.
Clustering solutions play a critical role during these transitions. “With our clustering technology, we allow you to move applications seamlessly from on-prem into Outposts, and then from Outposts into the cloud—into, you know, a traditional cloud region—all while minimizing the downtime of that migration,” Bermingham explains.
Disaster Recovery in Hybrid Environments
Disaster recovery strategies for AWS Outposts require a fundamentally hybrid mindset. While AWS provides tools like S3 replication and snapshotting, stateful applications need more robust protection.
“One smart strategy is to pair your Outpost with an AWS Region and replicate your data and workloads there,” Bermingham suggests. For database workloads, solutions like SIOS DataKeeper can replicate between Outposts on-premises and the public cloud, providing not just backup but also hot standby capabilities.
The Bottom Line for Enterprise Architects
AWS Outposts represents a significant step forward in hybrid cloud infrastructure, but successful implementations require careful architectural planning. Organizations cannot simply treat Outpost as “AWS in a box” and expect enterprise-grade availability for business-critical applications.
For DevOps teams and infrastructure architects, the key is understanding that Outpost extends cloud capabilities to on-premises environments while maintaining the need for traditional high availability patterns. Clustering solutions that can span multiple Outposts or bridge Outpost to AWS regions provide the foundation for truly resilient hybrid architectures.
As enterprises continue their digital transformation journeys, the combination of hybrid infrastructure and proven clustering technologies offers a path to modernization that doesn’t compromise on availability or control.
