AWS Expands its Hybrid Cloud to SQL Server

AWS has made SQL Server operating on its Outposts Relational Database Service (RDS) widely accessible, expanding its hybrid cloud database coverage, with more supported databases on the way.

Outposts RDS directly supports Microsoft SQL Server 2016, 2017, and 2019 in Enterprise, Standard, and Web Editions, according to an AWS blog.

Outposts is a fully run on-premises or co-location hardware box that hosts the Amazon Web Services cloud. The converged system includes computing, storage, networking, and database capabilities, as well as the same AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and resources used in the AWS public cloud. It is intended for workloads that need low-latency connectivity for local data processing and data residency, as well as to facilitate long-term application migration to AWS.

The AWS cloud management console is used to order and control Outposts RDS. The RDS instance can be backed up automatically to a nearby AWS field. Automatic RDS failover to a regional RDS instance is on the way. Amazon says it will embrace more databases in the future, most likely relational ones.

Amazon's ElastiCache memory database and ALB device load balancer are both supported by Outposts.

Outposts hardware is currently a 42U rack with the ability to scale up to 96 racks. Later this year, it will be available in slightly smaller sizes; 1U and 2U servers.

SPECIFICATIONS

The 1U Outposts comes with 64 vCPUs, 128 GiB of memory, and 4TB of local NVMe storage. The 2U Outposts offer up to 128 vCPUs, 512 GiB memory, and 8TB of local NVMe storage, with options for accelerators such as AWS Inferentia or GPUs. Customers will be able to run Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS), and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on-premises for each service.

This year will also see the release of a VMware version running a completely controlled VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC).

In October of last year, AWS added S3 Outposts support to its current Elastic Block Store (EBS) support. Clumio, Cohesity, Commvault, CTERA, NetApp, Pure Storage, Qumulo, and WekaIO provide third-party filesystems and data protection services.