How Google Anthos can help you leverage a managed and flexible approach to modernizing your infrastructure and applications.
March 22, 2023 | By PT Thilavanh
There’s no doubt that Google Anthos is a game-changer for the enterprise, which increasingly needs to manage the complexity of application development across hybrid and multicloud environments.
What is Google Anthos?
Anthos is a centralized hybrid and multicloud solution that provides a suite of services, all built on the foundation of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which orchestrates and manages clusters and containers as a service on Google Cloud. Anthos goes beyond traditional concepts of hybrid clouds to drive application modernization, with containers at the core.
Google Anthos Features and Benefits
As we see more enterprise applications migrate to the cloud, there is an increasing need to modernize those applications. For example, breaking down from large monolithic to microservices-based containers and leveraging cloud-native services have already solved some of the major problems that enterprises face.
This has led to an increase in hybrid applications running in the cloud, some running in on-premises that cannot be migrated, some running at the edge that are close to end users, some V-based, some container-based and—at times—some running in a multicloud environment. In addition, there are some edge cases where the enterprises need to run an instance of the application on-premises due to end-user constraints. The result: communications between applications have become more challenging, and the management of the hybrid applications has gotten more complex.
A leading healthcare IT solutions and services provider used Google Anthos to increase scalability in their production environment and reduce operating costs.
Read about the Google Cloud transformation story.
The Google Anthos platform provides a service mesh that can synchronize services and workloads and solve these challenges with a suite of services, like:
- Anthos Clusters
- Anthos Config Management: Config Sync, Policy Controller
- Anthos Service Mesh managed control plane and data plane
- Anthos Distributed Cloud Edge
- Cloud Run for Anthos
- Anthos Migrate to Containers
Anthos Migrate to Containers
Anthos Migrate to Containers can migrate applications running in virtual machines (VMs) to containers without any code change and is often the first step in the process of application
modernization. Anthos GKE, in addition to container orchestration, makes cluster management a lot easier with a single pane of glass across all clusters.
Anthos Config Management
Anthos Config Management helps with the centralized configuration management across all the clusters. Just as Anthos enables you to manage all your clusters in a single pane of glass, Anthos Config Management operates underneath that single pane, managing your clusters for you. By grouping your clusters into fleets, you can then make updates on features or security policies that will be implemented across the entire fleet.
Anthos Service Mesh
Anthos Service Mesh helps solve the communication problem between the enterprise applications—for example, if you have VMs running on multicloud, on-premises and edge, and you want to build services on GKE. Anthos provides a service fabric that can synchronize services and workloads from on-premises—or from other cloud providers—to Google Cloud.
Additionally, this flexibility provides leverage to negotiate with cloud vendors and avoid overreliance upon a service provided by a single vendor—also referred to as vendor lock-in. For example, with Anthos, you can use a specific vendor to take advantage of incentives or cost advantages applied to specific services.
Google Anthos Supports Infrastructure Modernization
Anthos is really a one-stop shop, enabling your teams to modernize and manage your applications and infrastructure. How? Anthos goes beyond standard infrastructure as code (IaC) to provision your infrastructure for you and your GKE platform to run your applications. Capable of running across multiple cloud instances for multicloud or hybrid solutions, Anthos unlocks efficiency for your teams.
Leverage a Technology Partner like TEKsystems to Navigate Google Anthos
Anthos, a powerful but very complex technology, requires a governed approach. Teaming up with experienced technology partners can help you innovate faster and smarter. As a Google Cloud Premier Partner, TEKsystems can help provide a carefully built and nuanced Anthos solution that bridges any cloud provider. Together, we’ll help enable the scenarios that maximize flexibility, such as moving workloads either partially or in their entirety, while helping to take advantage of financial incentives and enhance the outcome of failover scenarios.
