Google Anthos : The Game Changing Move By Google
What is Anthos?
Notwithstanding winning uncommon notices at the Cloud Next meeting, the Anthos declaration came covered in uncertainty. Everything that was said about Google’s new earth shattering administration was set apart by, and the documentation accessible in the open space so far is inadequate. Put something aside for its multi-cloud application organization and mixture availability, and very little is thought about Google’s Anthos.
We rally to understand what this innovation holds and its looming suggestions. Here is the means by which it very well may be best portrayed more or less:
- Anthos is not a single product but rather an umbrella brand covering multiple services. In that sense, it is markedly different from any other cloud services.
- These services cater to cloud migration, application modernization, multi-cloud management, and hybrid cloud.
- It is an open source project built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that manages containers service for the company’s Cloud Platform.
- A major advantage of Anthos is that you don’t get locked on to any particular cloud vendor.
WHAT ANTHOS BRINGS TO THE TABLE
It is clear that Anthos brings a new edge to the market, and companies from all industries will be turning to this solution for:
- Fully Managed Kubernetes. Google’s release of Anthos reiterates that customers are looking more and more for fully managed offerings as they relate to the cloud. The platform provides a single point for managing, monitoring, logging and securing your Kubernetes footprint from a single control point. This is huge for the hybrid cloud environment, as the tooling for on-premises typically varies greatly from what is being used in the cloud.
- Application Modernization. Some of the hardest workloads to move to the cloud are legacy applications. For these, you typically would have to perform a “lift and shift” first before beginning the process of modernizing the application to take advantage of cloud native concepts. With Anthos, Google provides the ability to begin the application modernization process by providing the tools developers need where they need them.
- Consistent Development and Deployment. No longer are you stuck having to choose an on-premises Kubernetes distribution versus what is running in the cloud. “Develop once, deploy anywhere” with open standards that allow for deploying and maintaining the application either on-premises or in the cloud. Down the line, if existing on-premises workloads ever need to be migrated, you can expect a consistent experience in the cloud.
- Security Policy and Automation. Ensuring consistent security policy management across a hybrid cloud environment can be challenging without a lot of investment in automation to maintain your policy configurations across your various systems. With Anthos Config Management, you get a solution that was built from the ground up to automate the simple tasks that are often the most prone to error. It will allow you to create and deploy policies across your entire Kubernetes landscape.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/anthos-overview
Google Has More Work To Do With Anthos
And that’s part of the problem with Anthos as it exists today. The Anthos team at Google still has work to do to make it more than just a “me too” hybrid cloud platform, including:
- Getting Anthos up and running on AWS and Azure. Google took pains to differentiate Anthos from the “hardware” approach of AWS Outposts (AWS hardware on-prem, fully managed by AWS, plus AWS services) or Azure Stack (certified hardware platforms required), but Amazon and Microsoft chose those approaches to ensure on-premises service-level agreements and support for a wide range of their cloud services, not only their Kubernetes platforms. Google aims to be the multicloud Kubernetes control plane on any infrastructure, but while ensuring the same experience, security, and performance on-premises and in Google Cloud is one thing, doing so on any infrastructure is another. Anthos cannot yet be a “run anywhere you want to” solution until then.
- Tighter integration of Cloud Run on Anthos. Cloud Run is Google’s managed compute platform that runs stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. Built on Knative, it’s Kubernetes- and Anthos-ready, but the product integration and go-to market isn’t there yet. Still, it’s a step up from the “bring your own function-as-a-service” integration exercise that enterprise developers who want to run serverless workloads on Kubernetes are faced with today.
- Consolidation of Cloud Functions and Cloud Run as part of the Anthos platform. Serverless developers now have three Google services as potential deployment targets: Google App Engine, Google Cloud Functions, and the new Cloud Run/Cloud Run on GKE/Knative. Without prescriptive guidance on when to choose and use each service, enterprise developers may prove wary of all of them. It would make sense for Google to consolidate around Cloud Run as a service within Anthos, much like Pivotal Function Service is a component of Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
- Moving beyond “serverless containers.” Taking an existing workload and dumping it into a container doesn’t make it serverless. It might still be a “big ball of mud” that doesn’t scale and indiscriminately burns resources. Modernizing monoliths for serverless involves teasing them apart, making individual services stateless and capable of scaling to zero. No amount of “lift and shift” migration magic will get enterprise developers around the technical debt embedded in these monoliths.
Anthos is Google’s first step into cloud-native opinionated — and, yes, “hybrid” and “multicloud” — development platforms. Anthos isn’t the first “container-plus-serverless” platform, and we doubt it will be the last. Enterprise customers should add Anthos and Cloud Run to their OpenShift vs. Cloud Foundry bake-off evaluations while leaving room for additional on-prem entrants from Microsoft and Amazon later this year. Expect each platform provider to support the core table stakes: containers, orchestration, service mesh, API management, logging, and tracing. In the near term, look for platform differentiation in developer experiences and DevOps tools, functions as a service, support for events, and integration with unique public cloud services.
Impact on the Future
This vantage point is the thing that Google would intend to benefit from changing the account around the cloud-local environment. In the event that things work out precisely in accordance with the organization’s vision for Anthos, this new administration will before long rise as the favored stage for running undertaking outstanding tasks at hand. With everything taken into account, the advantages of Google’s push for Anthos will reach out past the business itself. The cloud-local biological system and the open source network, as well, remain to pick up from the quickened appropriation of Kubernetes.