Introducing Anthos: An entirely new platform by Google Cloud for managing applications in multi-cloud world

By Urs Hölzle, SVP Technical Infrastructure, Technical Infrastructure and Eyal Manor, VP, Engineering, Google Cloud

Let’s face it, even in the best of cases, enterprise IT can be rigid, complex and expensive. When we talk to customers with extensive on-prem investments, they tell us they want to take advantage of the cloud’s scalability, innovative services and geographic scope, but they’re worried about getting locked into the wrong provider. Why is it, they ask, that they still can’t write once, run anywhere?

Today, we’re excited to introduce Anthos, Google Cloud’s new open platform that lets you run an app anywhere—simply, flexibly and securely. Embracing open standards, Anthos lets you run your applications, unmodified, on existing on-prem hardware investments or in the public cloud, and is based on the Cloud Services Platform that we announced last year.

Now, we’re making Anthos’ hybrid functionality generally available both on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and in your data center with GKE On-Prem. Anthos will also 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, without requiring administrators and developers to learn different environments and APIs.

Throughout it all, Anthos is a 100 per cent software-based solution. You can quickly get up and running on your existing hardware—with no forced stack refresh. Anthos leverages open APIs, giving you the freedom to modernize any place, any time and at your own pace. Because Anthos is based on GKE, our managed Kubernetes service, you automatically get the latest feature updates and security patches.

Introducing Anthos Migrate: Cloud migration and modernisation made easy
We’re also excited to announce Anthos Migrate in beta, which auto-migrates VMs from on-premises, or other clouds, directly into containers in GKE with minimal effort. This unique migration technology lets you migrate and modernize your infrastructure in one streamlined motion, without upfront modifications to the original VMs or applications. Through this transformation, your IT team is free from managing infrastructure tasks like VM maintenance and OS patching, so it can focus on managing and developing applications. Migrating also lets you take advantage of other integrations within Anthos.

Early Anthos customer success stories
Global enterprise customers in a number of industries are already using Anthos as a flexible, portable, software-based solution on which to build hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

For HSBC, one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world, a managed cloud environment that reduces the complexity and costs of big data analytics is essential to its hybrid cloud strategy.

“At HSBC, we needed a consistent platform to deploy both on-premises and in the cloud,” says Darryl West, Group CIO, HSBC, adding, “Google Cloud’s software-based approach for managing hybrid environments provided us an innovative, differentiated solution that was able to be deployed quickly for our customers.”

Siemens, the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe, is excited for the insight GKE On-Prem will bring to their complex, hybrid environment.

“Anthos is a great fit for us. It gives us a unified management view of our hybrid deployment and a consistent platform to run our workloads across environments,“ says Martin Lehofer, Head of Research, Siemens.

Building a multi-cloud ecosystem
Many of our customers have existing software and infrastructure investments, yet still want the freedom to invest in their cloud future. We’re working closely with our ecosystem of partners to support these customers, launching with more than 30 hardware, software and system integration partners ready to help customers leverage Anthos right out of the gate.

“We know that hybrid and multi-cloud approaches represent the future for many of our customers,” says Kip Compton​, ​SVP, Cloud Platforms and Solutions​ at Cisco. “Our customers want to develop and deploy their applications anywhere—on-prem, in the public cloud, or in multiple public clouds—seamlessly and securely. We’re excited to make that possible by integrating Cisco’s industry-leading data center, networking, and security technologies with Anthos and growing our partnership with Google Cloud.” ​

Using Anthos, Cisco will deliver the freedom of hybrid to enterprise customers, helping them get up and running quickly in the cloud based on integrations between Anthos and Cisco’s data center, networking, and security technologies, including Cisco HyperFlex, Cisco ACI, and Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud and Cisco SD-WAN. This combination offers businesses all the benefits of a fully-managed service like GKE combined with Cisco’s infrastructure capabilities.

In addition, partners such as VMware, Dell EMC, HPE, Intel, and Lenovo have committed to delivering Anthos on their own hyperconverged infrastructure for their customers. By validating Anthos on their solution stacks, our mutual customers can choose hardware based on their storage, memory, and performance needs.

System integrators are also on tap to help you modernize and extend your applications using Anthos. We’re excited that partners including Accenture, Arctiq, Atos, Cognizant, Deloitte, HCL Technologies, NTT Communications, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, and WWT are building services and solutions to help you to incorporate Anthos into your environment.

Finally, we are working closely with enterprise software providers to integrate their offerings with Anthos’ unique capabilities. To date, more than 20 ISVs have already committed to integrating their software with Anthos.

Streamlining multi-cloud management
Anthos also includes capabilities to help you automate policy and security at scale across your deployments: 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. It also works great 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.

Your favorite Kubernetes apps, ready and waiting in GCP Marketplace
The GCP Marketplace offers Kubernetes applications for DevOps, security, databases and more. Active installations of Kubernetes apps grew by 65 percent this past quarter. These Kubernetes apps are generally available, with commercial and open-source options, and include prebuilt deployment templates, simple licensing, and one consolidated Google Cloud bill. You can deploy many of them to Anthos via GKE in the cloud, on-premises, and in multi-cloud scenarios.

Meanwhile, if you build applications on GCP, we now offer a new Private Catalog, a hosted software catalog service for your IT solutions, to help you maintain compliance and governance, simplify internal solution discovery, and ensure that your developers only use approved and compatible apps. Currently in beta, Private Catalog lets you manage applications you created on GCP.

Meeting developers where they are with updates to Cloud Build
Custom workers, a new feature in Cloud Build—our continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform—help developers code, build, test, and deploy workloads on-prem and move them to the cloud when they’re ready. With custom workers, you can choose from on-prem source code, artifacts, and other build dependencies to create CI/CD pipelines in Anthos. This includes support for on-prem tools like GitHub Enterprise, BitBucket, GitLab, and Artifactory.

To complement Anthos’ ability to help you modernize at your own pace, we have also made various advancements in the domain of hybrid API management.

Your cloud, anywhere
Anthos’ open-source approach makes it a safe choice for your cloud strategy. With partners like Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE, VMware, and many others, it’s broadly supported. And because Anthos is fully managed, even on-prem, you get the benefits of open source without the hassle of needing to operate it.

If you can’t reduce the complexity of your IT, you can’t move faster. From container management to security to traffic management to software development, Anthos makes things simpler: simpler to operate, simpler to secure, simpler to modernize, and simpler to write.

To learn more about the architecture behind Anthos, please see Application Modernization and the Decoupling of Infrastructure, Services and Teams, a white paper by distinguished Googlers, Eric Brewer and Jennifer Lin. Sign up here if you are interested in learning more about Anthos Migrate and Anthos’ multi-cloud capabilities.