Introducing Anthos: The Google Cloud Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Platform

The recently concluded Cloud Next 2019 event was a crucial time for Google.  During the conference, which attracts thousands of visitors each year, Google announced the general availability of their new platform. Anthos is an enterprise-level multi-cloud and hybrid solution, designed specifically to give today's companies the freedom they need.Despite hundreds of other announcements made at Google Next, Anthos is one of the most compelling. Not only does it highlight Google's decision to embrace the enterprise data center environment, but Anthos also showcases Google's commitment to innovation. Today, Google is one of the first mainstream cloud providers to offer a multi-cloud platform.

Unlike other public cloud services, Anthos aligns with the rising trends of hybrid cloud development, cloud migration, and multi-cloud management.

Let's take a look at what Anthos means.

What is Anthos?

Previously known as the Cloud Services Platform from Google, Anthos lets innovative administrators build and manage hybrid applications across a host of environments.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that Anthos comes powered by the world's most popular open-source project - Kubernetes. It's also built on the back of other industry-leading tech from Google and designed to allow you to transform your cloud architecture with a focus on innovation, flexibility, and simplicity.

Anthos is available through the Google Kubernetes Engine - Google's managed container as a service offering. According to the Google team, it will ensure that today's companies can strategically enable and enhance their business by upgrading their systems with a microservices architecture, containers, and a complete service mesh delivered and handled by Google.

Features include:

• Complete flexibility: Modernize your data solutions on-premise and in the cloud to ensure better business agility, get your products to market faster, and accomplish more with Kubernetes services from Google.
• Migrate and Modernize: Use the Anthos Migrate system to convert your workloads into the containers offered by Google Kubernetes Engine, and target workloads that include physical servers and on-premise VMs, as well as Compute Engine solutions.
• Automate security and policy: Through a service-centric infrastructure overview, you can ensure that you spend less time managing applications, and more time gaining awareness and control.
• Consistent experience: Make sure that your investments are entirely future-proof, by building on a stable architecture from Google. Whether you need your systems to run on the cloud or on-premise, Google has you covered with Anthos.

The Building Blocks of Google Anthos

Anthos is made up of several crucial technologies from the heart of the Google data management portfolio. Some of the features that come together to give you the Anthos experience include:

• The Google Kubernetes Engine - the control center for Anthos. Use GKE's control panel to manage your distributed infrastructure running on-premise, in the Google cloud, or on other cloud platforms.
• GKE on Prem - Make sure that you can run your Kubernetes clusters with ease from an on-premise environment. You can deploy GKE on-prem on any compatible hardware and leave Google to manage the platform for you. On-prem runs as a virtual appliance through VMWare vSphere 6.5.
• Istio - Istio technology is the service mesh part of the Anthos experience. It connects the various other applications and components deployed in your data center, other clouds, and the GCP. Istio seamlessly integrates with software-defined networks like Cisco ACI, VMWare NSX, and Google Andromeda.
• Anthos Config Manager - The Kubernetes platform is highly extensible - which is one of its biggest benefits. Since Anthos customers will probably be using a range of deployments across multiple environments, the Config Management solution will give them more control and transparency. Anthos Config Management maintains and applies configurations to one or more clusters automatically.
• Anthos Migrate - Need to move your existing applications, physical servers, and VMs into the Anthos system? No problem. Anthos Migrate allows you to automatically migrate and convert servers and VMs from Compute Engine, on-premise environments, and other clouds directly.
• Stackdriver - Google Stackdriver delivers more transparency and observability to the applications and infrastructure that you're running through the Anthos system. Customers will be able to track the state of the clusters running in Anthos, as well as the health of the applications deployed in their managed clusters. This is the environment where you can monitor, log, and observe everything in your system.
• GCP Cloud Interconnect: To support the "hybrid" side of their Anthos offering, Google ensures that you can enjoy reliable high speeds from your connectivity solutions. Cloud Interconnect delivers rates as high as 100Gbps while connecting the data center in the cloud. Customers will also be able to use telco networks offered by providers like NTT Communications, and Equinix.

For those who want to build out on their Anthos experience, there's also access to the Kubernetes Applications on the Google Cloud Platform marketplace. If you're going to evolve your strategy in any way, you can simply browse through the ready-to-go development stacks on the GCP marketplace and adjust your solutions at your leisure.

Anthos Solutions

Ultimately, Google did an amazing job making their hybrid and multi-cloud product as flexible and scalable as today's companies need. Anthos comes with a host of different solutions to choose from, depending on what you need to do with your infrastructure. For instance, if you want to expose your services more securely, or break down your technology stack in a more granular way, you can access API management through Apigee. The API management service through Anthos ensures that you can send parts of your services to employees, partners, and customers easily.

You can also empower the next-generation developers on your cloud building team, with a GKE solution powered by Knative. The Knative experience extends Kubernetes as far as you need to go while giving developers a fully serverless experience.

Continuously testing your cloud and on-premise strategies is the best way to make sure that you're ready for anything. Google provides Continuous Integration so you can constantly build, test, and deploy your systems. This gives you complete control over your custom workflows. There's also Continuous delivery available for developers that want to create and ship applications as quickly as possible too.

Transforming Cloud and Hybrid Environments with Anthos

For Google, Anthos is the next step in building a secure, integrated platform that allows mid-sized enterprise companies to update how they secure, develop, and operate their cloud-native environments. Built on open-source Google technologies like Knative, Istio, and Kubernetes, Anthos provides you with complete freedom.

By placing all of your IT resources into the same consistent framework for control, management, and development, Anthos helps businesses to manage and evolve their cloud infrastructure and hybrid environments. You can automate the low-value tasks you have in any on-premise and cloud environment and avoid being locked into solutions from a single brand.

A hybrid and multi-cloud approach will allow companies to extend the abilities of their IT stack, without excessive up-front capital expenditure. What's more, Anthos also preserves your existing investments too.

Anthos is designed for any company that wants to modernize its applications and infrastructure. It could be the right solution for you if:

• You want to migrate away from your on-premise data centre
• You're looking for a way to implement a hybrid strategy
• You need better control over your multi-cloud environment
• You need a consistent platform for managing and building applications
• You need to help your developers become more productive on any environment

Anthos allows companies to access all the resources they need to bring coding dreams into reliably, securely, and consistently.

How to Get Started with Anthos

To start using Google Anthos, you'll need to set up an On-Prem GKE cluster, and start running some native cloud apps, or migrating your existing apps into that cluster. When you containerize your on-premise solutions, you'll be able to unlock the benefits of a more modern and extensible application development environment within your data center. You'll also enjoy a more portable management experience between your Kubernetes engine on the cloud, and On-Prem GKE solutions.

With your cluster set up, make sure that it's appropriately registered with the Google Cloud Platform. This will allow you to view and manage all of your clusters in a single pane of glass environment.

Go into the GKE On-Prem cluster management service to enable Anthos Configuration management across your new GKE clusters. You'll need to register Anthos with your Google Cloud Platform administrator account.

Exciting New Things from Google

Already, companies around the world, including system integrators and service providers are gearing up to connect their systems with the new opportunity from Google. The hybrid push from one of the world's biggest cloud providers could equate to a vast services opportunity.

Google's new bet on the Anthos solution will benefit both the developer community, the open source environment, and the cloud ecosystem. If you've ever wanted to invest in a hybrid or multi-cloud solution with Google's Cloud Platform at its core, now could be the ideal time to get started.

To find out more about Google Cloud, the G-Suite and other solutions available from Google, reach out to Coolhead Tech today!