Anthos: How Google changed the perception of hybrid cloud solutions

Why was Anthos created?

Anthos is a way for applications and services that were born on-premises and in cold, dark datacenters to experience the true freedom of the public cloud. Anthos is Google’s way to show a path for an easy transition towards using cloud-managed services or on-premises services managed by the public cloud. One of the biggest challenges of the hybrid cloud is the consistency of the experience of working with on-premises and cloud infrastructures. Anthos is aiming to solve that problem by providing the consistency of experiences across different, non-common environments.

In addition to a solution for consistency of experience, Anthos helps customers with data residency limitations and meets a customer’s applications in the environment where data processing is possible. Industries like healthcare, finance, and government institutions are very careful with processing their data outside of their secure datacenter environments and this is where Anthos comes in handy because of its ability to run a modern application on-premises and leverage the power of tools that were previously only available in GCP.

Consistency of the tools for on-premises and the GCP environment makes Anthos a perfect platform for transitting applications into the public cloud or building modern applications across a hybrid environment.

Customers will benefit from using Anthos in the following ways:

• The ability to experiment with cloud-like services while keeping data in-house.
• The opportunity to have a playground and test environment to see how the application that was born in datacenters can operate in an environment that is very similar to a public cloud.
• A smoother transition towards using cloud infrastructure and segregate workloads that should be on-prem from the ones that can easily operate in the cloud and leverage unlimited scale capabilities.
• The adoption of tools that will work in the cloud environment the same good as in the cloud-native environment for future projects.
• The safety of trying and adopting new technology without doing a hard cutover.

Is Anthos a great fit for everyone?

Anthos is not a magic pill, but it can be in the right hands. Anthos has specific requirements for the customer’s infrastructure and hardware setup. Implementing Anthos will require teams to rethink the way the application is architected, structured, out of which components it is created and how they are talking to each other. The development lifecycle and engineering teams’ habits should change with Anthos to get the most out of using Microservice architecture, Dockerized environments, deployment strategies, and applications that are ready for scale and high loads.

Get ready for it.