Google Cloud Anthos
What is Google Cloud Anthos?
Enterprises tend to handle networking, storage, and certain workloads across multiple clouds and their personal data centers. Depending on the service being utilized on these clouds, the enterprise needs to manage infrastructure, services, and containers while enforcing their policies in each one of these platforms. In addition, applications need to be developed and deployed both on these clouds and on-premises. Due to the complicated nature of these actions across different platforms, establishing operational consistency, staying current, and ensuring compliance can be a problem. How can these enterprises centrally manage their resources across the clouds? How can they consistently secure and operate existing apps while building and deploying new ones? Google Cloud Anthos is the answer.
Anthos is a modern application management platform that offers Google Cloud services and engineering practices to modernize application development and deployment. It is a cloud-agnostic solution built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that is capable of working with Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, and others. What sets Anthos apart from other GCP services is that it is not just a single service but a multitude of services under a single brand. These services include application modernization, cloud migration, multi-cloud management, and hybrid cloud.
How does Google Cloud Anthos work?
Anthos provides a unified platform for you, as an enterprise, to manage all your resources and services across various clouds you may be using and your local data centers. As a platform administrator, you will be able to access a UI with a structured view of your entire system (clusters, services, etc.). This makes your company’s landscape observable with information streaming from multiple clouds. This information can be used in the informed decision-making process at different levels of your organization. From here you can decide which services or apps can be migrated from your local data centers to the cloud; and which ones should remain in the data center (mission-critical).
Landscape management and policy enforcement are, however, not this simple. Different clusters require different policies and levels of security. Fleets (Environs), a feature of Anthos, allows access to logical sets of underlying Kubernetes clusters. These logical sets apply to these clusters irrespective of the cloud they function in to create consistent policies across your system. You can specify the right detail level for your applications for what you need them to do across different regions and development stages. Anthos Config-Management enables you to automate policies and security for apps deployed on Kubernetes on multiple clouds.
Anthos provides a platform to modernize app development. Using environs, you can easily abstract infrastructure from application teams by enabling these teams to bridge development and operations activities. They do this by incorporating a wide range of CI/CD solutions in addition to environs. This allows you to manage your applications as detailed as you want.
Anthos also permits you to run Kubernetes clusters both on the cloud and on-premises. This is a managed service with simple installs and upgrades managed by Google. Here you can containerize applications at diverse locations and keep your environments in sync, given you are using the same version on them. Anthos is a multi-service solution that enables security upgrade, rational use of resources, fast innovation ; and most interestingly without worrying about vendor lock-in (being unable to use another vendor without significant switching costs).