News

Google Aims Anthos Cloud Application Platform at Rival AWS, with Azure Up Next

• By David Ramel
• 04/22/2020

Google's Anthos multi-cloud and hybrid application platform now works with the rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud computing platform, with upcoming support for Microsoft Azure now in preview.

Anthos aims to provide a consistent application development and IT operations experience spanning hybrid, multi-cloud and on-premises environments, working with virtual machines and containers while promising a reduction in operational overhead and an improvement in developer productivity.

It was introduced a year ago, when Google touted its embrace of open standards and the ability to run unmodified applications on existing on-premises hardware or in the public cloud.

"Anthos will also let you manage workloads running on third-party clouds like AWS and Azure, giving you the freedom to deploy, run and manage your applications on the cloud of your choice, without requiring administrators and developers to learn different environments and APIs," Google said at the time.

Today, the multi-cloud promise was realized with an announcement of AWS support.

"Now, you can consolidate all your operations across on-premises, Google Cloud, and other clouds starting with AWS (support for Microsoft Azure is currently in preview)," said Google exec Jennifer Lin.

Anthos consists of four primary components:

• Anthos GKE: This is a container orchestration and management service for running Kubernetes clusters in both cloud and on-premises environments.
• Anthos Config Management: This helps organizations in defining, automating and enforcing policies across said environments in order to meet specific security and compliance requirements.
• Anthos Service Mesh: This is used to manage and secure traffic between services while monitoring, troubleshooting, and improving application performance.
• Anthos security: This secures hybrid and multi-cloud deployments by providing consistent controls across environments.

Along with announcing AWS support, Lin said the latest Anthos release also helps organizations manage two of the more complex aspects of traditional workloads:

• Policy and configuration management: "With Anthos Config Management, you can now use a programmatic and declarative approach to manage policies for your VMs on Google Cloud just as you do for your containers. This reduces the likelihood of configuration errors due to manual intervention while speeding up time to delivery. In the meantime, the platform ensures your applications are running with the desired state at all times."
• Managing services on heterogeneous deployments: "Over the coming months Anthos Service Mesh will also include support for applications running in virtual machines, letting you consistently manage security and policy across different workloads in Google Cloud, on-premises and in other clouds."

Google also announced enhancements to the Migrate for Anthos service, and announced that along with Azure support, future releases will provide the ability to run Anthos without requiring the use of third-party hypervisors.