Google Anthos 101

Google Anthos is now generally available after a successful limited release. Anthos is a multi-cloud management platform built on open standards. It allows organisations to leverage the benefits of AWS, GCP, their on-premises servers and soon, Microsoft Azure, at the same time.

Anthos abstracts away the complexities of running your environment with multiple cloud providers, unifying your deployments, security and monitoring in one place.

Take Advantage of Multiple Clouds

The cloud provider market is continually innovating. New products, services and pricing models are rapidly expanding the scope of the world’s leading cloud providers.

For IT leaders and cloud architects, choosing a cloud provider is a difficult and risky decision. Would new services in other clouds change your choice? Will your chosen provider continue to be a market leader?

With Anthos, you can run services from any combination of cloud providers, leveraging the benefits of all of them. A hybrid environment allows you to:

• Take advantage of the strengths and latest innovations of every cloud.

• Protect against costly migrations between providers.

• Avoid licence costs and build a cost-optimised environment.

• Seamlessly integrate your on-premises services with cloud ones.

The freedom and flexibility between cloud providers keeps opportunities open. Organisations don’t need to make tradeoffs between security and agility or reliability and cost; they can make the best choice for every design decision.

Modernising Your Cloud Environment

On-premises environments are often inflexible, but they don’t have to block innovation and development. With a multi-cloud environment, you can preserve the security, performance and data privacy benefits of on-premises servers, whilst adopting the latest compute and storage technologies.

Anthos builds upon the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to support moves towards a service-based, containerised infrastructures. Anthos GKE on-prem helps you lift your on-prem services onto Kubernetes clusters, ready to integrate with other cloud providers, ramp up efficiency and automate deployments.

Anthos Technical Overview: A sample architecture connecting your GKE on-prem and GCP services.

Unifying Management

Anthos’s key functionality is its centralised, integrated management platform. Anthos enables developers to rapidly deploy their work and offers architects the visibility of environment-level metrics they need.

The unified Anthos dashboard hides the complexities of running multiple clouds. It combines the logging, performance tracking and policy control functions of each cloud provider. Architects and cloud managers also have power over all their security and access control configurations.

This results in a single source of truth across all environments. Organisations have complete visibility over every service, with centralised alerts and monitoring. Your configuration changes flow to every service, saving you from modifying settings with each cloud provider manually.

Having an integrated environment also allows you to set up or continue your CI/CD workflows, enabling rapid delivery of the products and services built by developers.

A generated architecture model within the Anthos service mesh dashboard.

The Future of Cloud Services

Anthos is a continuation of Google’s commitment to open source. GCP continues to build upon open standards, with a focus on interoperability and flexibility. It allows organisations to adopt multi-cloud, hybrid environments that match their goals and priorities.

Businesses no longer need to feel tied down to a cloud provider. With Anthos, they make architectural decisions based on their expertise and actual requirements.

Without the need to see choosing a provider as a long-term commitment, or as an abandonment of on-premises services, the open cloud model could be as disruptive as cloud computing itself.