Google Cloud has announced that Anthos, its software for deploying and managing Kubernetes workloads across multiple on-premise and cloud environments, now supports workloads on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform and must follow Microsoft Azure support, which is still in the pipeline. Google Cloud attributes the delay in Azure support to internal engineering resources and “market demand”, which is stronger for AWS than for the Microsoft cloud.
Those who are unfamiliar with Anthos should know that it is a multi-cloud, hybrid, and open platform where existing applications can be updated, created, and run anywhere. Anthos is based on open source technologies developed by Google such as Kubernetes, Istio, and Knative. Anthos ensures consistency between the cloud and local environments and speeds application development.
Jennifer Lin, vice president of product management at Google Cloud, said:
” In business life, change is both constant and unpredictable. When you create platforms to drive your organization forward, you can’t be constrained by yesterday’s technology decisions. Nor can the systems you create today limit your ability to act tomorrow. In times of uncertainty, you need an architecture that gives you the agility and flexibility you need to manage or even leverage change.”
The announcement was slightly delayed compared to expectations as Google Cloud was scheduled to announce the news at its Cloud Next conference in early April, but the event was postponed due to the COVID 19 pandemic.
Anthos has been widely available since last year and offers customers a unique platform from which they can run container-based applications on-premise, in the Google cloud and, more importantly, in other large public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and AWS, although support for competing for cloud vendors’ solutions is slow.
According to Lin, the flexibility to run applications where they are needed, without adding complexity, was a key factor in choosing Anthos: “Many customers want to leverage their existing investments both on-premise and in other clouds, and a common management layer helps them deliver high-quality services with reduced overhead.
And to make it clear: Anthos customers often use this flexibility to enable their teams to work across platforms rather than being trapped in one platform.
Anthos now supports the same configuration management for virtual machines in the Google Cloud through the configuration management console as it would for containers.
With Anthos Config Management, you can now use a programmatic and declarative approach to manage policies for your virtual machines in the Google Cloud the same way you do for your containers. This reduces the likelihood of configuration errors due to manual intervention while speeding up lead time.
Google Cloud, the platform ensures that your applications always run in the desired state
Google Cloud also plans to integrate with Anthos service mesh support for applications running in virtual machines in the coming months. This support enables consistent security and policy management for all workloads in the Google Cloud, local, and other clouds.
The main idea behind these developments is to enable operators to define dynamic configurations and automated identity and security policies that are bound to specific workloads and namespaces, regardless of where they are running.