Industry On The Move: Google Revolutionizes Multi-Cloud With Anthos

Enterprises have many concerns about migrating to the public cloud, but hopefully a new platform from Google Cloud can put those concerns to rest and simplify the multi-cloud experience.

Introducing, Anthos

On April 9, Google Cloud unveiled Anthos, its new application management platform designed to help enterprises modernize applications that are on-prem or in the cloud. The announcement was made during the opening keynote of Google Next 2019 in San Francisco.

In addition to the name change (Anthos used to be called Cloud Services Platform), Google Cloud revealed some of new capabilities of the platform. Anthon enables virtual machines to be migrated to containers. From there, it can be run on any Kubernetes cluster, including any cloud. The rollout of Anthos includes expanded support to both AWS and Azure.

With the new platform tools, enterprises can develop hybrid applications across different environments and then deploy them on any cloud. Enterprises can even decide which percentage of those apps can be deployed across specific cloud environments. Anthos also features a single dashboard for enterprises to manage all of their applications across numerous environments in one place.

Anthos is relying on containers to service enterprise apps and provide seamless hybrid cloud experience. It is also based on Google’s Kubernetes tool —which is something that is offered by competitors such as Amazon and Microsoft. However, the difference is that Google’s Kubernetes tool is free and open source.

Google Cloud also announced several partnerships for Anthos, including with VMware and Cisco. In fact, to show off the multi-cloud capabilities during the announcement, Google Cloud reportedly ran a VMware-based app inside a Kubernetes container and deployed it at AWS.

What This Means For Enterprises

Google Cloud’s decision to unveil Anthos is a reflection of the increasing adoption of multi-cloud in the enterprise. Along with hybrid cloud strategies, multi-cloud presents numerous complications in the enterprise, such as reliability and unforeseen costs from containers. Even enterprises that leverage multiple public cloud platforms often miss out on all of the capabilities.

“We hear from our customers that multi-cloud and hybrid is really an acute pain point,” said Urs Hölzle Google’s senior VP for its technical infrastructure.

The launch of Anthos means that enterprises can run applications across multiple cloud platforms. This will give organizations the ability to develop applications once and quickly repeat on other clouds. If leveraged correctly, it could decrease operational costs and simplify multi-cloud strategies.

Other Notable Announcements At Google Next 2019

In addition to the launch of Anthos, there were several other noteworthy announcements at Google Next 2019, including:

• A new artificial intelligence (AI) platform from Google with more advanced solutions to help developers quickly analyze data
• New identity tools from Google that help streamline access management
• Google’s new Cloud Code, which assists with the development of cloud-native apps
• New partnerships with data management and analytics companies, such as Confluent and DataStax
• Google Cloud integrations with HR platforms ADP and Namely, and integrations with Dropbox
• New Google Cloud CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the company will hire hundreds of salespeople in order to compete with Amazon and Microsoft in the enterprise.