In an event yesterday, Google has announced ‘Anthos’ — the new home to the company’s growing Cloud services business. The platforms runs on Google’s Kubernotes Engine and is now generally available.
Anthos lets you run your applications, unmodified, on existing on-premises hardware investments or in the public cloud, and is based on the Cloud Services Platform that the company announced last year. Google is now making Anthos’ hybrid functionality generally available, both on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and in your data center with GKE On-Prem. Anthos will also let you manage workloads running on third-party clouds like AWS and Azure.
Google says, that Anthos is a 100% software-based solution. It lets you quickly get up and running on your existing hardware—with no forced stack refresh. Anthos leverages open APIs to ensure the same. Because Anthos is based on GKE, you automatically get the latest feature updates and security patches from Google.
Along with Anthos, the search giant has also come up with the beta of ‘Anthos Migrate’. As the name suggests, the Anthos Migrate service auto-migrates VMs from on-premises, or other clouds, directly into containers in GKE with minimal effort. What this does for you, is letting you migrate and modernize your infrastructure in one streamlined motion, without upfront modifications to the original VMs or applications. Through this transformation, your IT team is free from managing infrastructure tasks like VM maintenance and OS patching, so it can focus on managing and developing applications. Migrating also lets you take advantage of other integrations within Anthos.
One of the early adopters for Google’s Anthos offering is Cisco. The company will deliver the freedom of hybrid to enterprise customers, helping them get up and running quickly in the cloud based on integrations between Anthos and Cisco’s data center, networking, and security technologies, including Cisco HyperFlex, Cisco ACI, and Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud and Cisco SD-WAN. This combination offers businesses all the benefits of a fully-managed service like GKE combined with Cisco’s infrastructure capabilities.
Anthos also includes capabilities to help you automate policy and security at scale across your deployments: Anthos Config Management lets you create multi-cluster policies out of the box that set and enforce role-based access controls, resource quotas, and create namespaces, all from a single source of truth. It also works great with the open-source Istio service mesh, giving you a scalable foundation for policy enforcement, letting services establish trust, and encrypting traffic without code changes.
