Archive article - published on October 29 2020
Modern business runs in the Cloud. It’s that simple. The Cloud provides advantages that traditional environments don’t offer. Those include scalability, innovative services, and geographic scope, to name a few. But, businesses with extensive on-premise investments remain cautious about making a move to the digital ether. Chief among their concerns is being locked into one provider.
Enter Anthos Hybrid Cloud. Introduced by Google in early 2019, the platform brought the facilities to allow enterprises to write applications, package them into containers, and then manage their deployment across Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS, and Azure. Anthos also works with each of the Cloud services providers’ on-prem data centers.
Eyal Manor, the GM for Anthos, characterizes the platform as one that creates consistency without the burden of proprietary functions and procedures. He said, “...for the first time, we enable portability between different infrastructure environments….” Now, businesses can focus their resources on a single technology, rather than many proprietary cloud technologies.
At the core of the Anthos Hybrid Cloud platform is the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), the open-source environment for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications. But Anthos draws upon the power of other technologies as well. These include:
GKE On-prem - hybrid cloud software that brings Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to on-premises data centers;
Istio – an open-source service mesh for running distributed microservice architecture;
Velostrata – enables the movement of workloads from on-premises data centers to and from the public cloud;
Stackdriver – a VM monitoring service for Google Cloud Platform and other web services;
Knative – for deploying, running and managing serverless, cloud-native applications to Kubernetes.
Anthos enables consistency between cloud and other environments. Unlike other public cloud services, Anthos is distinguished as an umbrella for multiple services. Under that umbrella, the platform features cloud migration, hybrid cloud hosting, and multi-cloud management. In a word, its theme is modernization for today’s applications.
For Google, modernization means Kubernetes will be the underlay for deploying and running all enterprise applications. In support of that, the company has invested in technologies such as Velostrata to enable businesses to migrate to its multi-cloud platform easily.
To support these migrations, the company has also developed a suite of tools, called Anthos Service Mesh, that provides system administrators with an infrastructure layer that enables managed, observable, and secure communication across services. Jennifer Lin, VP of product management for Google says this kind of support will drive “...better agility and taking the complexity out of it so that we have abstractions that work across any environment, whether it’s legacy or new or on-prem or AWS or GCP.”
Interoperability and portability are essential in a hybrid cloud hosting environment. Since the interaction of on-premise, private cloud, and multiple public cloud spaces is new to most organizations, planning is essential for ensuring a seamless flow of data and information. Anthos can relieve these concerns. However, as good as the platform is, implementation with a trusted advisor's expert help is preferable. Schedule your free consultation today, and start bridging the multi-cloud divide today.
Let’s just have a chat and see where this goes.
