Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a massive operation and as it continues to expand beyond the confines of its regional data centers, the world’s largest cloud provider has taken flight into some of the more convoluted shadows of cloud computing.

Outposts, Wavelength, and Local Zones are the low-lying and more distributed clouds AWS is deploying to bring its compute, storage, and infrastructure services to the aid of specialized use cases, businesses that require hybrid architecture, and connectivity delivered via wireless 5G networks. 

AWS CEO Andy Jassy this week, during his keynote at AWS re:Invent 2020, tried to create some daylight between these services and explain how they differentiate based on the unique requirements of various customers. 

The first remote effort, aptly named Outposts, was announced in 2018, and landed in late 2019. This service targets on-premises workloads and resources, and “effectively rolls in racks of AWS services. You’ve got compute, storage, database, and analytics, and soon machine learning, fully managed,” Jassy explained. “We deliver it, we’ll install it, we’ll do all the maintenance, and it comes with the same APIs, the same control plane, the same tools, and the same hardware.”

AWS Outposts reaches thousands of customers now, including Cisco, Ericsson, Lockheed Martin, Philips, T-Systems, Toyota, and Volkswagen, he said.

While that service works for enterprises requiring more sophisticated on-premises data centers, there are other businesses that don’t want or can’t afford big racks and want access to a similar service in a smaller footprint, according to Jassy. On cue, he announced two new smaller formats of Outposts that allow customers to run AWS infrastructure in locations with less space.

“Instead of these big rack solutions, these are server solutions for Outpost,” Jassy said. The smaller of the two, the 1U size, is 1.75 inches tall or 1/40th the size of a traditional Outpost kit, and the 2U size is 3.5 inches tall, he explained. 

“These two smaller Outposts formats have the same functionalities of Outposts just for a smaller space, and now it means that restaurants, or hospitals, or retail stores, or factories can use Outposts to have AWS distributed to that edge,” Jassy said. 

The company is also expanding its footprint of AWS Local Zones for situations where customers want AWS distributed in major metropolitan areas but in cases “where it may not be cost effective either for [AWS] or [the customer] to have a data center there,” he said. 

AWS’ first Local Zone, which focuses on end users and resources not on premises but allows developers to connect back to workloads running in AWS with the ability to deploy applications that require single-digit millisecond latencies, was established in Los Angeles about a year ago. 

Jassy said AWS this week launched Local Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami, and it will hit 12 more U.S. cities in 2021. These include Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle. 

“We’re excited about it and we think it’s going to help you deploy AWS metropolitan city edges,” he said, adding that the company’s Snowcone storage box and broader Snowball family of storage and data transfer devices can equip businesses in rugged locations without connectivity. 

Finally, after explaining the strategy for Local Zones and Outposts, big and small, Jassy detailed AWS’ vision for Wavelength, a service it first launched with Verizon to marry network operators’ 5G networks with AWS’ edge compute service.

5G, in mostly theoretical terms today, allows applications to run at sub-10 millisecond latency and opens a series of yet-to-be-seen use cases. “But any application that wants to do anything interesting is going to need compute, it’s going to need storage, it’s going to need infrastructure,” Jassy said.

However, for mobile applications to ride on that infrastructure “they have to go from the device to the mobile network, to the local aggregation site, to the regional aggregation location, to the internet, to AWS, and back, and that’s not 10 milliseconds, that’s seconds,” he said. 

AWS aims to minimize those hops by extending its services to the 5G edge “so that now you only have to go from the device to the natural 5G aggregation site, and AWS has racks of Outposts right there for you to do your infrastructure,” Jassy explained. 

The service is now live on Verizon’s 5G network in eight U.S. cities and the operator says it will reach two more cities before the end of 2020. Meanwhile, Wavelength is launching with KDDI in Japan and SK Telecom in South Korea later this year, followed by Vodafone in the United Kingdom in early 2021, according to Jassy.

Considering the nuances of each 5G operator, AWS designed Wavelength as an abstraction so developers can just write code for a Wavelength zone and let AWS do all the “normalizing under the covers,” he said. 

Wavelengths, Local Zones, and Outposts are a collection of the many ways AWS wants to bring its cloud platform to customers wherever they are, based on their requirements, Jassy said. “So, when you go back to asking what is hybrid, it’s not just cloud and on-premises data centers. It’s cloud along with various edge nodes, on-premises data centers being one of them, but there are several others."

That hybrid experience will “be delivered by AWS by distributing AWS to these edge nodes with the same APIs, the same control plane, the same tools, and the same hardware they get in AWS regions,” Jassy said. “That’s where we believe hybrid is heading, and how we’re trying to enable it.”