As it looks for greener revenue pastures, Google Cloud has today announced a new solution for its telco clients, ‘Anthos for Telecom’ which will bring its Anthos cloud application platform to the network edge. This will essentially allow telecommunications companies to run their applications wherever it makes the most sense. And since Anthos is built on Kubernetes, the entire platform is open-source.
‘Anthos for Telecom’ will basically take advantage of the thousands of edge locations already existing across telecom networks, to enable a global distributed edge.
Google Cloud unveiled this as a part of a broader new “Global Mobile Edge Cloud” strategy aimed at making in-roads in what could potentially be a very lucrative market for Google given the onset of 5G as well as the rise of edge computing.
Under this new service called “Global Mobile Edge Cloud”, telecom providers will be able to run their applications not just in Google’s 20+ cloud data regions, but also in Google’s more than 130 edge locations around the world.
“We’re basically giving you compute power on our edge, where previously it was only for Google users, through the Anthos platform,” explained Eyal Manor, the VP of Engineering for Anthos. “The edge is very powerful and I think we will now see substantially more innovation happening for applications that are latency-sensitive. We’ve been investing in edge compute and edge networking for a long time in Google over the years for the internal services. And we think it’s a fairly unique capability now to open it up for third-party customers.”
Manor claims the launch of Anthos for telecommunications fulfills a long-pending demand of customers.
“Anthos brings the best of cloud-as-a-service to our customers, wherever they are, in multiple environments and provide the lock-in free environment with the latest cloud tools,” explained Manor. “The goal is really to empower developers and operators to move faster in a consistent way, so regardless of where you are, you don’t have to train your technical staff. It works on-premise, it works on GCP and on other clouds. And that’s what we hear from customers — customers really like a choice,” he added.
Google has teamed up with AT&T for the launch of the service. For now, the service is only available to telecom partners but Google eventually plans to open its edge cloud to other verticals, as well.
