AWS Outposts servers offer HA through the use of redundant power equipment that can be paired with dual customer-provided power sources for even greater resilience. Power is critical to any compute resource but network connectivity is also critical for Outposts deployments as management, monitoring, and service operations need connectivity to the anchor AZ. However, Outposts servers do not contain redundant physical networking ports, so AWS recommends that customers ensure maximum network redundancy as far as they can to minimize network disruptions to the Outpost.
Customers can improve upon the availability of their Outposts servers’ workloads by deploying additional Outposts servers. AWS recommends that customers deploy N+1 instances for each instance family that’s used when there is sufficient additional capacity. In the case of Outposts server hardware issues, this N+1 strategy will enable customers to use CloudWatch actions to deploy recovery and failover mechanisms. Also, customers can alert on metrics such as capacity issues and application health with CloudWatch alarms.
Customers deploying multiple Outposts should choose different AZs for their additional deployments and provision applications onto multiple Outposts to further increase application availability in the case of AZ failures.
Service availability
Amazon EC2, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and AWS IoT Greengrass are the only services that are supported on AWS Outposts Server at present.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud EC2
The selection of instance types is limited to the following on AWS Outposts servers:
1U option
- C6gd.16xlarge w/AWS Graviton2 CPU (ARM)
2U option
- C6id.16xlarge
- C6id.32xlarge w/Intel Xeon Ice Lake processor
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Customers can launch non-Fargate versions of Amazon ECS on AWS Outposts servers for full-scale container orchestration.
Note that the supplemental services of Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Network Load Balancer (NLB), and Amazon Route 53 require AWS region connectivity. The lack of access to these supplemental services means that no new clusters can be created, no new actions can be performed on existing clusters, instance failures will not be automatically replaced, and CloudWatch logs and event data will not propagate.