Google Anthos Explained

March 5th, 2020 | Tech

By Darshan Puttannaiah

Make Modern Applications a Reality With Anthos

When organizations consider migrating their applications and workloads to the cloud, the two most common cloud providers considered are AWS and Microsoft Azure. Yet Google’s new public cloud offering called Anthos is poised to change cloud computing the way it’s Android mobile operating system transformed the smartphone landscape. As an open cloud computing platform that works well across multi-cloud environments, Anthos is making headway with organizations that are focused on application migration and hybrid cloud deployments.

Google Anthos is a fully managed hybrid cloud platform launched in 2019. It’s the latest iteration of the Google Cloud Services platform that emphasizes workload deployment on-prem and across public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and AWS. With Google Anthos, organizations can modernize their existing applications, build new ones, and securely run them anywhere.

According to research from industry analyst firm Forrester, “organizations desired a consistent experience for developers, security professionals, and operations teams to modernize apps faster and with confidence. They turned to Anthos to deliver automation, speed, and scale to their modern application development toolchain — with the experience they enjoy on the public cloud in their own data centers.”

Embracing open standards with technologies including Kubernetes, Istio for Knative, Anthos helps organizations build cloud-native applications or modernize legacy applications. These applications can then be maintained on-prem or in a multi-cloud environment with consistent policies, all from a cloud-based management plane.

The service uses the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) coupled with Anthos Migrate to provide workload portability across clouds without needing to modify applications or virtual machines. Anthos is meant to “run and manage your applications on the cloud of your choice, without requiring administrators and developers to learn different environments and APIs,” according to Google.

Anthos Core Components

Anthos’ core components consist of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Anthos Config Management, Anthos Service Mesh, and Anthos Migrate:

• Anthos Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) makes container management and deployment easier with Google Cloud Console providing a “single-pane-of-glass view” for cluster management across on-premises and public cloud environments.
• Anthos Config Management provides Kubernetes policy and security automation at scale for application development, deployment, and management both on-premise and in the cloud. 
• Google’s Anthos Service Mesh enables fully managed service meshes for complex microservices architectures including traffic management, mesh telemetry and securing service communications.
• Organizations can also simultaneously and automatically migrate their virtual machine (VM) apps to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with Anthos Migrate so that they can be run and managed through GKE with Istio service mesh capabilities.

Key Anthos Benefits

From an economic and IT investment future-proofing perspective, a Forrester Research Anthos Report commissioned by Google found that overall Anthos business benefits include operational efficiency, developer productivity and security productivity. On average, organizations saw a 4.8x return on investment within three years of adopting the Anthos cloud platform.

Anthos benefits also include application modernization in place. For instance, with Kubernetes services managed by Google, applications can be modernized, deployed and managed on-premises or across any public cloud provider. 

Finally, Anthos provides a service-centric IT infrastructure view for app awareness, consistency, and control. Organizations can define and centrally manage and view cloud configurations whether apps are on-premise or in a public cloud providing policy and security automation at scale.

Anthos Uses Cases

Anthos use cases vary from using the platform to deploy and manage Kubernetes on-premise to unified multi-cloud management and cloud application migration. 

Companies that cannot legally migrate all their applications to the cloud — due to compliance regulations or legacy applications that cannot be re-factored — have found success with Anthos GKE On-Prem, for example. The service lets companies containerize their applications and run them on-premise. 

International bank HSBC has used Google Anthos to simplify its highly complex IT environment that includes workloads running in multiple public clouds. Anthos GKE On-Prem allowed the bank to modernize its legacy applications and replace on-prem apps with cloud solutions, as permitted from a regulatory perspective.

Multi-cloud environments, although a preferred IT strategy, are complex and difficult to manage as the architecture requires different dashboards and tools for each cloud deployment. Anthos supports both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments to move workloads between public clouds without any code changes.

Retailer Kohl’s struggled to achieve scalability and reliability, especially during peak web traffic periods including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With Google’s centrally managed Anthos multi-cloud solution, Kohl’s integrated all of its apps into a multi-cloud environment to provide new omnichannel customer experiences. 

Finally, Cardinal Health needed to eliminate the inefficiencies of managing their on-prem infrastructure and keep up in a competitive marketplace. With Anthos Migrate, Cardinal Health moved thousands of virtual machines into the Google Cloud to save costs by streamlining compute resources, reducing energy consumption and saving IT staff time while modernizing their applications.

Are You Anthos Ready?

Find freedom and flexibility with Google Anthos. Speak to a Qwinix Google Cloud Platform expert to learn how Anthos can help you reach your goals. As a Google Cloud Platform Partner with over 150 GCP technical certifications, Qwinix helps organizations realize the full value of cloud with leading-edge insights and innovation.