The second Re:invent announcement that may strike fear into operators – especially those placing high hopes on the edge computing trend to enhance their business models – is Outposts. This sees AWS, in partnership with VMware, getting into the on-premises hardware business. Control of a physical industrial edge has been assumed to be a stretch for the centralized webscalers, and therefore an area where operators (telcos or enterprise network providers) could more easily seize the best place in the value chain. But Outposts is a way to bring the AWS cloud into the enterprise premises by offering enterprises local compute and storage, based on the same hardware as AWS uses in its own data centers. Users can run VMware private…