Anthos Is the future of cloud transformation

2 min read

Apr 11, 2019 12:00:00 AM

This blog post is co -authored by Alex Zadorozhniy - DevOps Technical Director and Bill Fraser - Principal Consultant in Customer Service Delivery at Pythian. On Tuesday, Google announced the general availability of Anthos, a re-branding of its Cloud Services Platform, which enables organizations to achieve consistency in how they develop, secure and operate their applications in hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. To fully understand the value proposition, it is necessary to provide some background. Over the past few years, containers have emerged as the preferred method of packaging, deploying and running modern software. Applications are no longer tightly coupled to the operating systems and machines (virtual or otherwise) they run on, which enables Development to achieve the velocity the business demands and Operations the freedom to decide how best to manage the underlying infrastructure. As applications began shifting from a monolithic architecture to a microservice one, Kubernetes became the de facto standard for orchestrating and scaling containers. Each of the major cloud providers rolled out a managed service offering built around Kubernetes and, as part of last year’s announcement of an on-premises version of Google’s managed Kubernetes offering (GKE On-Prem), organizations were one step closer to being able to manage containerized workloads consistently in hybrid environments. However, a few challenges remained: 1) although there was a clear path for deploying modern applications onto a Kubernetes based platform, a non-insignificant amount of effort would be required to migrate existing workloads; 2) it was still necessary to leverage each cloud provider’s tooling and APIs; and 3) cloud and on-premises environments were still separate and could not be centrally managed in a consistent manner. Anthos is how Google intends to address these challenges. Based on GKE On-Prem and including open source technologies such as Kubernetes, Istio and Knative, it now also provides the ability to migrate workloads and manage policy as code. Anthos Migrate is currently in beta but promises the ability to auto-migrate virtual machines from on-premises or other cloud environments directly into containers in GKE without requiring modifications to the VMs or infrastructure. Anthos Migrate also allows you to modernize applications while migrating them. We are excited to see how the tool can be leveraged to lower the barrier of entry in situations where there would otherwise be significant effort involved in migrating workloads. Anthos Config Management provides policy as code and enforcement of desired state configuration across hybrid Kubernetes deployments. Tenets of source control management such as versioning, branching and code review can now be applied to RBAC policies, resource quotas, and Kubernetes namespaces. The configuration of multiple disparate Kubernetes clusters can be validated, monitored for drift, and enforced centrally. Anthos is a platform that will change the way you develop and host your application for better. Once a company adopts Anthos for their existing complex application stack, they can release developers from thinking about how the application will be deployed and where will it be deployed. With Anthos, Google solves the dilemma for businesses of what cloud provider to choose and how infrastructure would look. Google helps businesses to become truly cloud agnostic and migrate their applications between different environments and clouds with ease. The core of Anthos is Kubernetes along with services supporting a smooth transition between any types of environments by still keeping the consistency of experience. Pythian is working closely with Google as a Partner to help use Google services in the most efficient way and to bring migration and application transformation to the next level. Something that was once complex or unattainable has become achievable with the help of Anthos. Stay tuned. Learn more about Anthos Platform , an entirely new platform for managing applications in today's multi-cloud world, or Pythian’s full range of expert services for Google Cloud Platform. References:

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