10 things you should know about Anthos, Google Cloud’s new open platform

Recently Google introduced Anthos, Google Cloud’s new open platform that lets you run an app anywhere. In this post, we take look at key points about Google Anthos Framework & how it enables open, hybrid, and multi-cloud future.

1. Google Anthos lets you run your applications, unmodified, on existing on-prem hardware investments or in the public cloud.

2. Anthos is based on GKE and will 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. This is possible, by enabling Anthos’ hybrid functionality on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and GKE On-Prem.

   If you’re looking for quickstart on basic understanding of Kubernetes concepts, please refer earlier posts for understanding on Kubernetes & how to create,deploy & rollout updates to the cluster.

3. For migration of existing workloads, customers need to build YAML files that define specific parameters about the source systems,the destination in GKE, and other variables. Anthos Migrate (beta) would take care of auto-migrating VMs from on-premises, or other clouds, directly into containers in GKE. Anthos Migrate is free for customers to use when migrating workloads to GCP. Customers will still pay for all other services they consume (compute, storage, GKE, etc.) .
4. Anthos Config Management lets you create multi-cluster policies out of the box that set and enforce role-based access controls, resource quotas, and create namespaces, all from a single source of truth.
5. Anthos works with the open-source Istio service mesh, giving you a scalable foundation for policy enforcement, letting services establish trust, and encrypting traffic without code changes.
6. With Anthos,you can deploy GCP Marketplace apps via GKE in the cloud, on-premises, and in multi-cloud scenarios.
7. Anthos comes with pre-built integration with platform-level services such as Stackdriver, Cloud Build, and Binary Authorization.
8. To get started with Anthos: Following are the key steps
   • Set up a GKE On-Prem cluster and start running new cloud-native apps or migrate some of your existing applications into the cluster.
   • Register the cluster with GCP, so you can view and manage all your GKE clusters (on-premises or in GCP)
   • Install open-source Istio on your GKE clusters to create service meshes and gain visibility for services running in your clusters. (Optional Step)
   • Enable Anthos Config Management across your GKE clusters (pre-installed as part of GKE On-Prem clusters) to manage Kubernetes and Istio policies across your managed clusters
9. Anthos is available as a monthly, term-based subscription service with a minimum one-year commitment. Learn more about Anthos pricing here.
10. By decoupling below critical components, Anthos framework enables developer agility, operational efficiency, platform governance, and also ensures consistency across an open, hybrid, and multi-cloud future.
    • Infrastructure is decoupled from the applications (via containers and Kubernetes)
    • Teams are decoupled from each other (via Kubernetes pods and services)
    • Development is decoupled from operations (via service and policy management)
    • Security is decoupled from development and operations (via structured policy
      management)

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Additional Resources

• Kubernetes Official documentation
• What are the key Kubernetes metrics that you have to monitor ?
• Get smallest, fastest, fully-conformant MicroK8s Kubernetes
• How to back up and restore your Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes?
• Implementing Policies in Kubernetes
• Download FREE eBook on Kubernetes
• Take a free course on Building Scalable Java Microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud