PagerDuty Blog

To The Cloud and Back On-Prem With AWS Outposts

Ask most people what they consider to be the core value of the AWS cloud, and they’ll probably include things like AWS’ scalability and flexibility. While this refers to their public cloud offerings, the same can be said about AWS Outposts—and maybe even more so.

AWS Outposts, announced at last year’s AWS re:Invent, is a fully managed service that offers AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and other tools to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. In short, you get AWS software and hardware in your choice of location connected seamlessly to the broader AWS cloud. Flexibility meets scalability, with true hybrid-cloud infrastructure.

The power of the AWS Cloud—when added to an on-premises datacenter—is a compelling value proposition for businesses embracing the cloud natively or through migration of workloads. From an operations standpoint, cloud professionals in highly regulated markets like healthcare, financial services, and government now have the ability to leverage the latest and greatest AWS cloud services and still adhere to strict data privacy and compliance rules with on-premises workloads. Industries that crave low-latency compute capabilities, such as high-frequency trading, medical labs, and academia, can use AWS Outposts to shorten the path for computational horsepower from multiple jumps to a direct connection to their data centers.

Additionally, AWS Outposts allows more traditional enterprises to dip their toes into the public cloud with regard to their data centers and use it as an on-ramp to cloud migration. This is exactly why PagerDuty is excited to extend our partnership with AWS through AWS Outposts.

For organizations that are migrating workloads to an AWS Outposts-based hybrid cloud, it’s important to understand the implications on a) your technology stack, b) people, culture, and skills, and c) operational process. PagerDuty, when combined with a full-service ownership model, plays an essential role in empowering and connecting all three of these focus areas.

Hybrid Cloud Technology Stack

The PagerDuty integration with AWS Outposts leverages the popular Amazon CloudWatch integration on-premises. This linkage happens through AWS Simple Notification Service(SNS) Topic, which is agnostic to the AWS workloads location, whether it is in the public cloud or Outposts. By creating this connection from AWS Outposts to PagerDuty, customers extend the digital operations capabilities of PagerDuty seamlessly across all AWS workloads, whether it is on-premise or cloud. The reference architecture below shows how this works.

People, Culture, and Operational Process

The one constant about the cloud is that it’s always changing—and with these changes come a wider range of incidents that can interrupt business continuity. Quite simply, a queued/ticketed approach to addressing issues negates the real-time value that cloud provides. PagerDuty helps teams reduce noise using cutting-edge machine learning, contextualize incidents for rapid response, and then automate remediate when possible for real-time operations.

Additionally, migrating to the AWS cloud and managing an Outposts-based hybrid infrastructure unlocks the ability to more easily adopt a “you build it, you own it” full-service ownership model, making it easier for teams to collaborate and resolve issues faster. Having the ability to quickly spin up AWS instances to build new apps and services means making some changes to ITOps workflows. With PagerDuty, the service team that owns a particular Outposts-based application can be provided with the right contextualized information to deal with these incidents in real time. This is critical to unlocking the power of Outposts.

Get Started With PagerDuty for AWS Outposts

PagerDuty has made it easy to learn more about, and get started with, your Outposts migration. If you’re new to PagerDuty, you can sign up for a free trial and learn more about how we help teams with their cloud migrations, adopt a full-service ownership model, and integration with key AWS services.

If you’re an existing PagerDuty customer using AWS Outposts, you can get started with our integration for AWS Outposts here, or connect with our support team to learn more.