Google uses the Cloud Next event in San Francisco to announce Anthos-- a Google Cloud open platform allowing users to run applications anywhere, be it on on existing on-premises hardware or in the public cloud.
Possibly named after either a lost Greek play or an obscure character from the Marvel comics, Anthos is the next version of the Google Cloud Services Platform. However, while Cloud Services Platform managed hybrid clouds spanning on-premises datacentres and the Google cloud, Anthos ups the ante by running on 3rd party clouds, including biggest rivals AWS and Azure.
According to Google, Anthos offers a single managed service for the management and deployment of workloads across clouds, without need for admins or developers to learn different environments or APIs. As a 100% software based solution it promises to be hardware-agnostic. It also leverages open APIs and is based on GKE, meaning it automatically gets the latest updates and security patches.
Further capabilities include Config Management, a means to create multi-cluster policies out of the box able to set and enforce role-based access controls, resource quotas and create namespaces. Anthos is also compatible with the Istio service mesh, providing a scalable foundation for policy enforcement.
The Anthos announcement brings a related Google product, this time in beta-- Anthos Migrate, a service to auto-migrate VMs from on-premises or other clouds directly to containers in GKE with "minimal effort." The technology is able to migrate and modernise infrastructure in one streamlined motion, without upfront modifications to original VMs or applications, freeing IT teams from tasks such as VM maintenance and OS patching.
Anthos will be available on a subscription-based basis. Google points out it already has a number of big-name hardware and software partners, including the likes of Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE and VMware, as well as developers such as Confluent, Datastax, Elastic, Portworx, Tigera, Splunk, GitLab and MongoDB, among others.
