LAS VEGAS — The long-awaited AWS Outposts has landed. It pushes the cloud giant into enterprise data centers and it’s moving to the network edge.

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy, after a lead-in by the re:Invent band performing The Doors’ "Break On Through," said the hybrid cloud service is generally available today.

How does AWS tie Outposts to The Doors? The cloud giant is “breaking on through” to the other side — aka the data center — get it? And yes, it’s a stretch.

“This makes it such that you can now run those workloads, which need to live on premises, with the same AWS APIs, the same AWS control plane,” and using several of the same AWS container and database services, “to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience,” Jassy more logically stated.

Jassy first announced the service at re:Invent last year. And finally, near the end of his three-hour keynote at this year’s show during which he announced more than 30 new cloud services and capabilities, Jassy provided additional Outposts details.

It’s a fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that allow customers to run compute and storage on premises.

“Instead of building this funky bridge between two things,” on-premises data centers and the cloud, Outposts brings native AWS services into on-premises data centers while “seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud," he explained.

Today, customers can run AWS services on Outposts including Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR). And they can connect directly to regional services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets or Amazon DynamoDB tables through private connections.

Beginning in 2020, AWS plans to add the ability to run more AWS services locally on AWS Outposts, beginning with Amazon S3.

AWS delivers and installs the racks to customers and handles all maintenance including automatically updating and patching infrastructure and services.

Outposts comes in two variants: an AWS native variant, which is available today, and VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, which is planned for availability in 2020. The latter enables customers to use the same VMware APIs and control plane on Outposts that they use to run their on-premises infrastructure.

“The second barrier we’re hearing from customers, particularly larger organizations, is say I have end users in a particular geography that have workloads that are latency sensitive, and where I don’t have a data center or a [colocated facility], and I don’t want to manage anymore,” Jassy said. “What can you do about that?”

In other words: customers want compute and storage closer to end users and devices, and this requires resources at the edge.

To solve this customer problem, Jassy announced Local Zones, which are a new type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services close to customers. “We realized Outposts was a really useful, low-level flexible building block,” Jassy said.

While Outposts targets on-premises workloads and resources, Local Zones focuses on end users and resources not on premises, but in a particular geographic area. Customers can use AWS compute, storage, database, and other cloud services locally while also connecting back to the rest of their workloads running in the AWS cloud.

The first Local Zone is in Los Angeles, and it gives developers in that region the ability to deploy applications that require single-digit millisecond latencies to end-users in the area.

And finally, AWS today announced another edge computing service called Wavelength, and a 5G partnership with Verizon. The partnership will embed AWS compute and storage at the edge of Verizon’s mobile network. This will allow developers to deploy ultra-low latency applications to mobile devices using 5G networks.