Google releases Anthos for cloud management

Google has released the production version of its Anthos platform for managing multicloud applications.

Formerly known as Google Cloud Services Platform, Anthos is a Kubernetes-powered technology to build and manage hybrid applications, for on-premises or cloud deployments. Anthos is available on Google Cloud Platform with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), adding infrastructure around Kubernetes.

Anthos also can manage workloads on third-party clouds, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. With Anthos, IT resources are put into a consistent framework for management, development, and control, with low-value and insecure tasks automated across on-premise sand Google Cloud infrastructure.

Features in Anthos include:

• Jobs can be written once and run anywhere, including Google’s cloud, other clouds or the user’s data center.
• Users can run Anthos on existing hardware with no forced stack refresh.
• APIs are provided for users to work with Anthos at their own pace.
• Linkage to GKE means users get the most-recent feature updates and security patches.
• Aside from Kubernetes, Anthos also is built on Istio, which is an open source service mesh to reduce the complexity of cloud deployments, and Knative, a Kubernetes platform for managing serverless workloads.

As part of the Anthos rollout, Google introduced a beta version of Anthos Migrate, to automigrate virtual machines from on-premises or other clouds to to containers in GKE. It handles infrastructure tasks such as OS patching and VM maintenance.

To get started with Anthos, users must set up a GKE On-Prem Cluster and start running new cloud-native apps or migrate some existing applications into a cluster. The cluster then must be registered with GKE. Users have the option to install Istio on GKE clusters to create service meshes. Also, Anthos Config Management must be enabled across GKE clusters.