Recently, Google announced on their blog the general availability of Anthos, a service for hybrid cloud and workload management that runs on the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Furthermore, besides running on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), it also allows customers to manage workloads running on third-party clouds like AWS and Azure.
Anthos is based on the Cloud Services Platform which Google rolled out last year for building and managing services in GCP or on-premise. Google will now make Anthos’ hybrid functionality generally available both on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), via Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and in a customers’ data center with GKE On-Prem – allowing them to manage workloads running on third-party clouds, like AWS and Azure.
Furthermore, Anthos will provide customers with the freedom to
deploy, run and manage their applications on the cloud of their choice,
without requiring administrators and developers to learn different
environments and APIs.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/anthos-overview
With Anthos, customers will get a “100% software-based solution” that they can get up and running on their existing hardware—with no forced stack refresh. Darryl West, Group CIO, HSBC, said in the same Google announcement blog post:
At HSBC, we needed a consistent platform to deploy both on-premises and in the cloud. Google Cloud’s software-based approach for managing hybrid environments provided us with an innovative, differentiated solution that was able to be deployed quickly for our customers.
Also, customers will benefit that Anthos is based on Google’s managed Kubernetes service GKE – allowing them to get the latest feature updates and security patches automatically.
With many enterprises having significant investments in their infrastructure and relations with their partners, Google has also partnered with more than 30 major hardware and software partners that range from Cisco to Dell EMC, HPE and VMware, as well as application vendors like Confluent, Datastax, Elastic, Portworx, Tigera, Splunk, GitLab, MongoDB and others.
In a Techcrunch article about Anthos, Premal Buch, CEO of Robin.io, a partner that worked closely with Google to develop the Anthos Storage API, said:
Robin Storage offers bare-metal performance, powerful data management capabilities and Kubernetes-native management to support running enterprise applications on Google Cloud’s Anthos across on-premises data centers and the cloud.
Google’s release of Anthos will further fuel a fierce competition with other public cloud vendors. Frank Gens, SVP and chief analyst for IDC, said in a ZDNet article:
Google’s competitors also understand that the cloud needs to be anywhere customers want it to be. In the last 24 months, all the major public cloud players — Google, Microsoft, IBM, and AWS — have been introducing technologies and products that bring their public cloud capabilities to customer on-prem and edge locations. In the next five years we’ll see a new battle for cloud leadership around this ‘cloud everywhere’ vision.
Although there is a ‘ cloud everywhere vision’, a respondent on a hacker news thread stated:
Buy into Kubernetes, buy into Google Anthos, have the appearance of flexibility, but get used to GCP’s tooling, quirks, documentation, etc., and before long you’re considering GCP as the first option for all new development.
Besides Anthos, Google is also launching the first beta of Anthos Migrate, a service that will auto-migrate VMs from on-premises or other clouds into containers in the Google Kubernetes Engine. With Anthos Migrate, customers will have an automatic migration process and once the container is on Google’s platform, they will be able to use all of the other features that come with the Anthos platform.
Google offers Anthos as a subscription-based service, with the list prices starting at $10,000/month per 100 vCPU block. More details on Anthos are available on the website.