Google Anthos Now Supports Multi-Cloud Workloads, Including AWS & Microsoft Azure In Preview

Google Cloud has announced, in a recent blog, that its Anthos platform can now support multi-cloud workloads and is now generally available for Amazon Web Services with plans to add Microsoft Azure.

In the blog post, Jennifer Lin the vice president of product management at Google Cloud stated, “Since first announcing Anthos, our multi-cloud and hybrid application platform, just under two years ago, we’ve been continuously delivering new capabilities to help organisations of all sizes develop, deploy, and manage applications more quickly and flexibly. Today, we are expanding Anthos to support more kinds of workloads, in more kinds of environments, in many more locations. With these announcements, we look forward to helping you build applications that can thrive in any environment.”

Anthos is Google's hybrid and multi-cloud platform that has been created in order to provide a management plane to multiple workloads. Such a differentiator, Anthos, can bring in more enterprise workloads for Google. It directly competes with AWS and Azure. Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian has stated that Anthos as a digital transformation engine that can be used in multiple industries to modernise enterprise applications.

According to Lin, more clouds means more options. She stated — “The flexibility to run applications where you need them without added complexity has been a key factor in choosing Anthos—many customers want to continue to use their existing investments both on-premises as well as in other clouds, and having a common management layer helps their teams deliver quality services with low overhead.”

The giant chose AWS first as a partner for their Anthos because of its demand among the customers; also Azure is in preview. The blog further stated a few names of the customers for Anthos multi-cloud support — KeyBank, which was a design partner, and Plaid, an analytics company. 

It also mentioned how Anthos now helps in managing two of the most complex pieces of traditional workloads:

Policy & configuration management - With Anthos config management, businesses can now use a programmatic and declarative approach to manage policies for your virtual machines on Google Cloud. This reduces the likelihood of configuration errors due to manual intervention while speeding up time to delivery. The platform also ensures your applications are running with the desired state at all times. 

Managing services on heterogeneous deployments - Anthos Service Mesh will also be planning to be updated including support for applications running in virtual machines, which will let businesses consistently manage security and policy across different workloads in Google Cloud, on-premises and other clouds. 

The blog also mentioned how businesses could run Anthos with no third-party hypervisor. Lin said Anthos would also be more capable on edge as well as cloud environments as it rolls out without a third-party hypervisor. Anthos on bare metal, which will be in preview later this year, can be used on edge computing deployments to maintain consistency with data centres and public clouds. Anthos will also have migration tools to modernise applications.