Google Cloud Anthos 101: What You Need to Know

These days, the move to the cloud is one of the biggest trends facing businesses of all sizes and backgrounds. However, while most enterprises want to take advantage of the latest tools and services in the cloud, not all companies want to abandon their existing infrastructure completely to move to a new service. In order to overcome this concern, Google has buckled down on its strategy to deliver hybrid and multi-cloud offerings to business leaders. 

One of the most crucial challenges for businesses to consider if you're planning on taking a hybrid cloud route is how you're going to adapt your cloud services to host your legacy systems. In the past, these issues has commonly been addressed through virtualization. However, the strategy of using VMs in the cloud comes with a few problems too, such as sacrifices in cloud efficiency, scalability, and adaptability. Fortunately, Google Cloud Anthos could be the answer. 

With Anthos, you don't have to make a one-size-fits-all choice for your cloud strategy. Instead, you can access the cloud through containers and Kubernetes clusters, while still embracing your existing hardware. Anthos also gives you the freedom to choose where you want to deploy specific applications, and how you're going to migrate workloads between a range of environments. 

How Does Google Cloud Anthos Work?

Up until recently, you may have known Google Cloud Anthos as the GCP services strategy. This cloud-agnostic environment uses containers and Kubernetes for workload orchestration, as well as Istio for microservices and app traffic management. 

Designed by the innovative team at Google, Anthos is a software-only product that runs on existing hardware in your environment. To create this offering, Google partnered with hardware providers like HP, NetApp, Dell, and Cisco, to deliver a host of pre-designed Anthos systems. The solution also runs on any server that's capable of managing Kubernetes clusters. 

Anthos aims to solve the problem of containerizing your legal applications, by transforming VM images into containers before they're deployed into Anthos. You also get access to additional services like monitoring, security, application management, and authorization solutions too. 

What's Anthos Made Up Of?

The heart of Anthos is a container cluster that's managed by the Google Kubernetes Engine. However, there are other core components in the service, too, such as:

• Istio on GKE: This solution connects clients to containerized applications and services while managing the way that traffic moves between microservices solutions. It can also promote usage and security policies for your workforce. 
• Anthos config management: This is an admin-focused component of Anthos that allows for the management of Kubernetes clusters. You can use the system to set up network and security policies across environments and handle clusters via a range of configurations stored in repositories across the Google Cloud. 
• Traffic director: This is a traffic control pane that adds various multi-region load balancing, demand autoscaling and health checking services into one location. It works with a range of sidecar proxies via APIs. 
• Migrate for Anthos: This solution automates and simplifies the process of migrating your legacy workloads into Kubernetes containers on the Google Cloud environment. 
• Stackdriver: This is the Google Cloud Platform service for monitoring, management, and debugging in the cloud. It also provides a central repository for your application, network and infrastructure strategies. 
• Cloud Run: This is a serverless platform that can run your event-driven workloads for you and deploy containers in the Kubernetes environment. It also allows apps to invite functions from containers without the need for newly configured services. 
• GCP marketplace: Anthos can use a range of pre-built applications on Kubernetes and development stacks to enhance your functionality. 

Making the Most of Anthos 

Currently, the Google team relies on containers to offer a consistent and dependable hybrid cloud environment to business users. Today, enterprises can use the various components of Cloud Anthos to coordinate and manage their cloud and on-prem workloads. If you're looking for a flexible way to simplify your migration to the cloud while making sure that you can continue to use your legacy investments, then Google Cloud Anthos might be the perfect solution.

With containers, and the help available from Google's range of professional services, you should have no problem taking your cloud strategy to the next level.