What is Google Anthos, What Does It Do?
As businesses embrace hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies in their digital transformation, cloud platform providers are shaping their product portfolios accordingly. Following the announcement of Anthos in 2019, Google has turned its cloud approach to a hybrid route in the fall of 2021 and is growing its market share every year. In this article, we focus on Google Anthos, the hybrid cloud management solution that plays an important role in growing Google’s market share.
In our articles about hybrid cloud and multi-cloud solutions, we mentioned that running workloads in multiple clouds and connecting different environments has become an industry standard. Competition is also accelerating among cloud providers who want to respond to this industry standard and develop solutions that align with the new approach of enterprises to cloud platforms. Google, one of the strong players in this competition, is positioned as one of the flag carriers of the race with Anthos, which it has added to the solution family.
Google’s broad portfolio of hybrid cloud services, which it designed and announced at its annual customer conference in October 2021 to perform computing processes in its network of data centers, at a partner facility or in a customer’s private data center, is centered around Anthos, the control software the company introduced a few years ago. Anthos acts as the cloud-local management console. The company is shifting its vision toward hybrid cloud to overcome customer barriers to moving to the public cloud, with the ability to even connect with competing vendors such as Microsoft and Amazon to deliver the flexibility and agility that cloud platforms promise.
As Global IT, Google’s oldest and only Premier business partner in Turkey, we focus on the definition, benefits and features of Google Anthos in this article.
What is Google Anthos, how does it work?
Google Anthos is a managed hybrid cloud platform launched in 2019. It is the latest addition to the Google Cloud family of solutions focused on workload distribution on-premises and across public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and AWS. With Anthos, organizations can modernize their existing applications, create new ones, and run them securely from anywhere.
Anthos is used to build, deploy and optimize applications on serverless infrastructures or virtual machines in a simple, flexible and secure way with Google Kubernetes Engine. Using the Anthos solution, businesses can run consistent development and operations processes for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. According to the Forrester Total Economic Impact study, Anthos enables up to 4.8x return on investment in 3 years, accelerating the virtual machine (VM)-based application migration journey and digital transformation.
By adopting open-source standards with technologies such as Kubernetes, Google Anthos enables organizations to build cloud-native applications or modernize legacy applications. These applications can then be controlled from a cloud-based management plane and kept on-premises or in a multi-cloud environment. Anthos uses Google Kubernetes Engine in conjunction with Anthos Migrate to enable workload portability between clouds without the need to switch applications or virtual machines. According to Google, Anthos aims to “run and manage applications in the cloud of their choice, without requiring administrators and developers to learn different environments and APIs.”
Features of Google Anthos
On Google’s product page, where details about Anthos are compiled, the main features of Anthos are shared with the following headings:
● Enterprise-grade container orchestration and management: Anthos makes it possible to manage Google Kubernetes Engine clusters and workloads running on virtual machines. Anthos is able to run on existing virtualized infrastructures and bare metal servers to achieve a consistently managed Kubernetes experience with Google-validated upgrades. By simplifying the application stack and reducing licensing costs, Anthos also saves time spent learning the requirements of different cloud platforms.
Automate policies and security at scale: Businesses that choose Anthos can define, automate, and enforce policies across different cloud environments to meet unique security and compliance requirements across their organization. Anthos Config Management can deploy the identified policies and changes to all Kubernetes clusters.
● Built-in visibility, fully managed service mesh: Anthos eases the burden on teams to monitor application performance, manage traffic between services during troubleshooting and optimization, and ensure security with Service Mesh.
● Modern security for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments: It integrates the security factor into all phases of the application lifecycle, from development to build, from runtime to update, providing a comprehensive security strategy across all deployment models.
● Continuous innovation, continuous deployment: Anthos is also fully compliant with the methodologies followed by the development teams and the strategy of continuous innovation (CI), continuous deployment (CD). Google Cloud enables access to the benefits of cloud-native CI/CD wherever Kubernetes can be run, including on-premises or other public clouds.
Benefits of Google Anthos
Google Anthos basically gives businesses the ability to develop and manage their applications on the cloud platform of their choice. In this way, Anthos promises faster deployment, also facilitating applications and the software supply chain. Standing out as a managed platform for all application deployments, both traditional and cloud-native, Anthos gives businesses the chance to create and manage global fleets. Moreover, operational consistency is not compromised in this process.
Anthos’ flexible working model enables businesses to take full advantage of cloud services, container technology and serverless architectures. This increases developer productivity and speed of deployment. As we mentioned, all protocols and security processes can be managed from a single point thanks to Anthos, which adds a layer of security to every stage of the product development cycle.
For those who want to be able to concretely focus on the economic and operational benefits of Anthos as well as the practical benefits it generates, the results of the research conducted by global research and consulting firm Forrester contain remarkable findings.
According to the Forrester Total Economic Impact study, businesses that invest in Anthos are better able to see a return on investment (return on investment | ROI) up to 4.8 times. Anthos users can observe a 40% to 55% increase in operational efficiency and achieve an efficiency of 58% to 75% in the application migration and modernization phases. Anthos delivers up to 96% productivity progress in accomplishing security tasks, reducing developers’ non-coding tasks by 23% to 38%.
In what cases can Anthos be used?
Anthos’ use cases range from deploying Kubernetes infrastructure on-premises, unified multi-cloud management, and cloud application migration. For example, companies that cannot move all their applications to the cloud due to compliance regulations or outdated applications that cannot be updated can achieve success with Anthos and Google Kubernetes Engine On-Prem. Anthos enables even legacy applications to work in harmony with existing cloud systems and to be delivered to every point within the company’s roof.
Although they offer essentially similar features, different cloud platforms are preferred by the majority of businesses. Yet this hybrid approach leads to what is called multi-cloud complexity. Because each cloud requires different dashboards and tools to deploy, hybrid and multi-cloud approaches are known to be complex and difficult to manage. That’s where Anthos comes in, supporting both hybrid and multi-cloud environments to move workloads between public clouds without any code changes.
In addition, Anthos plays an important role in the modernization of on-premises systems. Anthos comes with Migrate to streamline computing resources, reduce energy consumption, and modernize applications.
Discover the Anthos experience with Global IT
Global IT, which is the first brand that comes to mind when it comes to Google Cloud in Turkey, has been focusing only on the solutions offered by Google Cloud for 16 years. The company, which has successfully moved more than 700 companies and nearly 90 thousand users to the cloud in more than 3,300 projects completed to date, offers solutions in areas such as infrastructure, disaster recovery, data cloud and artificial intelligence, especially in the modernization of e-commerce.
As Google’s oldest and only Premier business partner in Turkey, Google is positioned as the main provider of Anthos solutions. If you would like to discover what Anthos can do for you, you can contact us via the form at the end of this page.
You can take a look at our success stories to witness how Google Cloud technologies such as Hepsiburada, N11, Trendyol, Getir, which Turkey’s retail and e-commerce giants access through Global IT, are transforming their businesses.
