Conor McNamara (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Outposts in Malaysia and Thailand, building on Southeast Asia momentum to provide a fully managed service through specialist channel partners.
Supported by expert providers such as InfoFabrica, True IDC, Maxis, Dailitech and CAT Telecom, Outposts is designed to deliver “managed and configurable” compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware. The move allows customers to run AWS compute, storage and database services on-premises, while connecting to AWS offerings in the cloud.
General availability in Malaysia and Thailand follows launches in Singapore and Indonesia earlier this year, targeting customers housing workloads that require low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing or local data storage.
“With Outposts, our customers can benefit from the accelerated pace of innovation in the cloud, while securely storing and processing sensitive data on-premises,” said Conor McNamara, managing director of ASEAN at AWS. “As Outposts is fully managed by AWS, our customers can also focus on their end users, and driving innovation that differentiates their businesses, while leaving the responsibility of managing the infrastructure to us.”
From a technology perspective, Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure and operating models to “virtually any” data centre, co-location space or on-premises facility.
Businesses in Malaysia and Thailand can now also leverage the AWS Partner Network (APN) to access expertise in moving applications to AWS through cloud migration projects. Services include initial discovery and assessment, planning, migration and operations, alongside cloud strategy and technology advisory offerings to migrate and run workloads on Outposts.
“Many of our enterprise customers look for hybrid cloud solutions that will allow them to move workloads and data seamlessly between on-premises assets and the AWS cloud,” added Wen Chi Li, founder and director of Singapore-based InfoFabrica. “Outposts makes this possible by allowing them to run AWS compute and storage on-premises, and also easily and seamlessly integrate on-premises workloads with the rest of their applications in the AWS cloud.
“With Outposts, our customers will get access to an industry-leading hybrid cloud architecture, allowing them to use the AWS Management Console to manage their on-premises assets seamlessly along with the broadest portfolio of cloud services available around the world.”
Meanwhile, True IDC - which became first partner to offer VMware Cloud on AWS in Thailand - has been operating as an advanced consulting partner in Thailand since 2015.
“We believe that Outposts will bring great opportunities and benefits to our customers in Thailand, especially those who require hybrid cloud solutions with low-latency performance for massive data, IoT, content and media projects,” said Tanat Sangkasem, CTO of True IDC.
“Thai customers can now run data processing apps in real-time on Outposts alongside their on-premises environment, allowing them to seamlessly use AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for their workloads.”
Another key launch specialist is Dailitech, a born-in-the-cloud APN advanced consulting partner based in Bangkok.
“We’ve been working exclusively with AWS since 2014 and we are thrilled to welcome AWS Outposts in Thailand, as it will make a huge difference for our customers who need a hybrid cloud infrastructure to support specific low latency applications,” outlined Dr. Vit Niennattrakul, managing director of DailiTech.
“We work with customers in industries like banking, insurance and manufacturing, and most have on-premises assets and applications that require very low latency. With Outposts, we can now offer them a truly hybrid solution that will allow them to use their on-premises assets seamlessly along with the broadest portfolio of cloud services available around the world.”
Enhanced offerings
First unveiled in November 2018, Outposts allows customers to select from a range of compute, storage and graphics-optimised Amazon EC2 instances, with or without local storage options, backed by Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume options.
Customers can then run a range of AWS services locally, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). This is in addition to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) offerings, alongside the ability to connect directly to regional services such as Amazon S3 buckets or Amazon DynamoDB through private connections.
“Outposts is the natural evolution of our existing strategic collaboration with AWS, and an expansion of Maxis cloud offerings and professional services,” said Claire Featherstone, head of Technology Practices and Cloud Centre of Excellence at Kuala Lumpur-based Maxis.
“Incorporating hybrid cloud will address the need for data residency and edge computing, all accessed through our leading next generation converged network. Our goal is to accelerate cloud adoption and digital transformation journeys for businesses, supported by one of the largest pool of AWS trained and certified resources in the country.”
Meanwhile, TM One - the enterprise vision of Telekom Malaysia - will leverage Outposts to overhaul consumer user experience levels within the business.
“Outposts is an important part of TM One's Cloud Alpha hybrid cloud strategy,” explained Ahmad Taufek Omar, executive vice president and CEO of TM One. “Our customers will benefit from AWS’ rapid pace of innovation in cloud infrastructure services while being able to store and process data on- premises.
"It will help us in our mission to enable the Malaysian public sector and enterprises to be more agile, while delivering better and more comprehensive services to end customers. This is in line with TM Group’s commitment in enabling Digital Malaysia."
