Customer interest in AWS Outposts is a reflection of Amazon Web Services getting the fundamental value proposition right for the hybrid solution that launched last December, according to the general manager of the service.

“We’ve really had what I would say is essentially off-the-charts interest from 100 countries around the world and businesses from the public sector to healthcare to manufacturing to online gaming and betting,” said Joshua Burgin, who’s been general manager of AWS Outposts since June. “It’s been kind of impressive the breadth of people that have reached out to us thinking that there might be something to being able to deliver this consistent hybrid experience for the portion of their workloads that have to be in a specific state or a specific country, whether it’s for latency or regulatory reasons. Although it’s still very early days, and there’s lots for us still to learn, I definitely believe…this is one of the most exciting businesses in AWS.”

In fact, Burgin said, that’s why he took his new role after serving for a year as technical advisor and chief of staff for AWS senior vice president Charlie Bell, whose team is responsible for AWS engineering, operations and product.

“It really has the potential to help open up new avenues for us and help customers accelerate their cloud migrations by filling this hole that was really difficult for us to address before for all the workloads that need to remain on premises,” said Burgin, who joined AWS in 1997 as one of its first 100 employees, left his role as senior systems engineer three years later and returned to AWS in 2014, serving as general manager of compute services for five years. “We certainly think that the customer interest is a reflection of AWS getting the fundamental value proposition correct.”

The industry’s leading cloud provider this week announced the AWS Outposts Ready Program that technically validates AWS Partner Network (APN) members’ solutions – including storage, networking, security and industry-specific solutions -- that can be integrated with AWS Outposts deployments. The program, part of the broader AWS Service Ready Program, launched this week with vetted products from 32 APN partners. Additional partners – more than the number announced -- are in the AWS Outposts Ready pipeline, according to Burgin. Those include Deloitte Consulting, which confirmed to CRN that it’s among global systems integrators going through the program.

“The Outposts Ready Program is actually a good example of the (customer) interest that we’re seeing,” Burgin said. “You kind of don’t have to take our word for it -- I don’t think we would have seen 30-plus partners sign up for the work to certify their solutions on Outposts, if they didn’t believe that their customers were going to adopt those solutions as well.”

Click through to see what Burgin had to say about how that customer interest in AWS Outposts is translating into customer adoption, why AWS still has a lot to learn regarding Outposts, channel partner opportunities for the service and what’s coming next for Outposts.

There’s also a full list of the 32 AWS technology and consulting partners that are AWS Outposts Ready launch partners – Amdocs, Cohesity, Dynatrace, NetApp, Palo Alto Networks and Sisense among them -- and their products that have been validated.