Google announces the availability of the Anthos hybrid cloud management platform for Amazon Web Services and on-premises. The Microsoft Azure version remains in preview, with launch expected by end 2020.
First launched back at Google Next 2019, Anthos is a service based on the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). It allows customers to run unmodified applications on either on-premises datacentres or the public cloud, since it acts as a common management layer between multi-cloud deployments. In fact, Google says the time is ripe for multi-cloud deployments, since they provide teams with the flexibility to work across platform and freedom from vendor lock-in.
In addition, Google announces deeper virtual machine support, meaning customers can extend the Anthos management framework into the types of workloads making the "vast majority" of existing systems. Anthos allows the management of two traditional workloads, namely policy and configuration management and service management on heterogeneous deployments. Anthos Config Management allows a programmative and declarative approach to VM management policies on Google Cloud, while Anthos Service Mesh manages security and policy across different workloads in Google Cloud, on-premises and other clouds.
Later in 2020 Google will allow customers to run Anthos with no 3rd party hypervisor, allowing greater performance for demanding workloads on bare metal deployments. Bare metal also powers Anthos at the edge for workloads beyond the datacentre and public cloud environments, such as retail stores, branch offices or remote sites.
Finally, the search giant plans to simplify migration with Migrate for Anthos, a means to reduce cost and improve performance without need to manually rearchitect or replatform workloads.
