Google today announced a sizable update to its Anthos multi-cloud platform that lets you build, deploy and manage containerized applications anywhere, including on Amazon’s AWS and (in preview) on Microsoft Azure.
Version 1.7 includes new features like improved metrics and logging for Anthos on AWS, a new Connect gateway to interact with any cluster from Google Cloud, and a preview of Google’s managed control plane for Anthos Service Mesh. Other new features include Windows container support for environments that use VMware’s vSphere platform and new tools for developers to make deploying their applications to any Anthos cluster easier.
Today’s update comes almost two years after Google CEO Sundar Pichai originally announced Anthos at its Cloud Next event in 2019 (before that, Google called this project the “Google Cloud Services Platform,” which launched three years ago). Hybrid and multi-cloud, it’s fair to say, takes a key role in the Google Cloud roadmap — and maybe more so for Google than for any of its competitors. Recently, Google brought on industry veteran Jeff Reed to become the VP of Product Management for Anthos.
Reed told me that he believes there are many factors right now that are putting Anthos in a good position. “The wind is at our back. We bet on Kubernetes and containers — those were good decisions,” he said. Increasingly, customers are also now scaling out their use of Kubernetes and have to figure out how to scale out their clusters best and deploy them in different environments — and to do so; they need a consistent platform across these environments. He also noted that when it comes to bringing on new Anthos customers, those factors determine whether a company will look into Anthos or not.
He acknowledged other players in this market but argued that Google Cloud’s take is also quite different. “I think we’re pretty unique in the sense that we’re from the cloud; cloud-native is our core approach,” he said. “A lot of what we talk about in [Anthos] 1.7 is about how we leverage the power of the cloud and use what we call “an anchor in the cloud” to make your life much easier. We’re more like a cloud vendor there, but because we support on-prem, we see some of those other folks.” For example, those other folks are IBM/Red Hat’s OpenShift and VMware’s Tanzu.
The addition of support for Windows containers in vSphere environments also points to the fact that many Anthos customers are classical enterprises trying to modernize their infrastructure yet still rely on many legacy applications they are now trying to bring to the cloud.
Looking ahead, we’ll likely see more integrations with a wider range of Google Cloud products into Anthos. And indeed, as Reed noted, inside Google Cloud, more teams are building their products on top of Anthos themselves. In turn, that then makes it easier to bring those services to an Anthos-managed environment anywhere. One of the first of these internal services that run on top of Anthos is Apigee. “Your Apigee deployment essentially has Anthos underneath the covers. So Apigee gets all the benefits of a container environment, scalability, and all those pieces — and we’ve made it simple for that whole environment to run kind of as a stack,” he said.
