Why Google Anthos is the new way of managing your multi-cloud workloads?

Hiba Rajput
5 min readSep 4, 2022

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Google entered a new game of multi-cloud with Anthos. Programmers and IT managers get help from Anthos to navigate the challenging waters of application services. It provides a uniform development and operations experience for on-premises and cloud. It combines infrastructure and application management across on-premises and other public clouds with Google Cloud-backed dependability. Google Anthos is changing the way of managing multi-cloud workloads with all the features. All cloud platforms try to assist the developers in modernizing applications, but Google Anthos has a centralized approach having everything in it.

What is Google Anthos and its building blocks?

Anthos, a contemporary application management platform, offers efficient development and operations experience for on-premises and cloud environments. It has developed a management console for cross-platform workloads. Anthos makes it simpler for businesses to manage their applications if apps operate on-premises, on various public cloud services, or both. It is a different and unique service for the enterprise workload and competes with AWS and Azure.

Building Blocks of Google Anthos

  • Google Kubernetes Engine: Google Kubernetes Engine is the main command-and-control center of Anthos. Customers using the GKE control plane manage the distributed architecture running on the Google cloud.
  • Istio: Istio made the integrated network management of Anthos possible. Istio serves as the service mesh tying together many application parts spread throughout the data center, GCP, and other clouds. It can integrate with load balancers and firewalls for customers having network devices from companies like F5.
  • Velostrata: Google purchased this technology in 2018 for the improvement of cloud migration for Kubernetes. Velostrata has two key features. First, it can stream physical and virtual machines from on-premises environments to GCE instances to generate replicas. Second, it can transform current VMs into Kubernetes apps.
  • Anthos Config Management: A platform that is policy-driven and extensible is Kubernetes. Google streamlines configuration management through Anthos as customers will deal with many Kubernetes deployments across various settings. Anthos Config Management can manage and apply the configuration to one or more clusters, from deployment artifacts, configuration settings, network policies, secrets, and passwords.
  • Stackdriver: Anthos infrastructure and applications get reliability with Stackdriver. Users may track the state of the Anthos-based clusters used and installed app well-being in each managed cluster. This platform is the principal hub for observability, logging, tracing, and monitoring.
  • GCP Cloud Interconnect: Fast connectivity between the corporate data center and the cloud architecture is the dominant feature of the hybrid cloud platform. When linking the data center and the cloud, Cloud Interconnects can give speeds of up to 100Gbps.

How Google Anthos is a new approach to managing multi-cloud?

The Benefits that differentiate Google Anthos from other multi-cloud management platforms are:

  1. Ensures Scalability and interoperability: Anthos supports open-source technological standards to create, manage, run, and migrate apps anywhere. It provides a flexible method of moving workloads between different clouds. Support for public clouds is part of the long-term roadmap of Google, despite Anthos can only be installed on-premise or in GCP. Anthos is ready for a multi-cloud future where businesses can scale their applications reliably across different infrastructures by allowing hybrid- and multi-cloud interoperability.
  2. Container implementation and cloud migration: Anthos automated features help in easily containerizing and moving On-premises workloads. In both GCP and on-premises scenarios, migrate for Anthos automates the migration of virtual machines to containers in GKE. In-place VM to container upgrades is carried out using Velostrata, which also provides CI/CD connectors for automating Docker processes. Anthos GCP clusters automatically update to the most recent Google-certified versions. With Anthos, GCP on-premises offers containerization and cloud migration, facilitating the ongoing modernization of old infrastructures.
  3. Enhanced built-in security: Over 60% of businesses mentioned security as a prime deterrent to using containers in production, development, and testing. Along with its features for containerization and cloud migration, Anthos delivers built-in security. Anthos excels at cross-cluster configuration management, which gives control and management from a single source of truth and permits the extension of native Kubernetes namespaces, labels, and annotations across multiple clusters. Istio L7 features let you create more precise ingress rules and network restrictions so that you can only execute the services you need. Anthos can enforce access controls, transit encryption, mutual authentication, and other security standards through a single management interface.
  4. Data sovereignty and legal management: If the data is in the Canadian data center of GCP, the customer can access it in the US but with legal considerations. As GCP is a US entity, laws apply even if the data is in Canada. In this way, the user loses the data sovereignty. A regional cloud that supports Anthos can assist enterprises in utilizing the robust feature set of Anthos without sacrificing their data sovereignty as they would in GCP. The on-premises make Anthos and other services while storing their data in Canada cloud infrastructure provided by cloud.ca, which saves businesses the cost of maintaining their infrastructure. It operates cloud.ca in its customers’ infrastructures for companies willing to make that expenditure.
  5. Centralized administration: Anthos allows platform administrators to monitor and administer their landscape from a single location, including policy control and marketplace access. It minimizes the number of person-hours spent on management, enforcement, discovery, and communication. Anthos also gives clients an out-of-the-box structured view of their complete system, including services, clusters, and more, simplifying their view and management and allowing them to increase security, use resources more efficiently, and show measurable success. Anthos normalizes a substantial part of practical labor, irrespective of where your Kubernetes cluster is located.

Conclusion

Containerize apps provided in multi-cloud settings of Anthos benefit enterprises with large legacy systems with elasticity, efficiency, and velocity. Anthos provides open-source technology standards to facilitate scalability and interoperability for hybrid and multiple clouds. It offers capabilities to make it easier to migrate old workloads to the cloud and containerize them. It assists foreign-based businesses in addressing potential security issues brought on by such multi-cloud environments while preserving data sovereignty. To continue their hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, Anthos enables businesses with vast, legacy infrastructures to benefit from open-source solutions created by Google.

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Hiba Rajput

Tech writer sharing insights on the latest trends. Diving tech, productivity, social media strategies and more. Follow for compelling reads and knowledge.