Moving to Hybrid Cloud with Google Anthos

Published in

DevOps Dudes

6 min readJan 30, 2021

Let’s Start with basics. Now, we often hear the terminologies Multi and Hybrid cloud, Do you know the difference?

Multi cloud is about majorly working on multiple clouds while hybrid cloud is about connecting your on-prem to cloud i.e. mixed computing, storage, and services environment made up of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and public cloud

Major Options we have for Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid Cloud Enabler

Azure Stack
AWS Outpost-
Google Anthos

Managed Kubernetes Provider

Rancher
Openshift
Azure Arc
Google Anthos
VMware Tanzu

In this Article, I will only touch Google Anthos, Above one is the figure taken from Platform9, For more generic knowledge before reading below, You can read this article.

1) What is Anthos

It consists of all these products that you see now on the board and possibly there will be more products as per google’s announcements.

Fun fact Anthos is flower in Greek. The reason why they chose that is because flowers grow on premise but they need rain from the Cloud to flourish.

As clearly depicted in above diagram, Anthos is sitting on management layer where the data could flow from any of the Hybrid cloud, Only GKE needs to be installed (on-prem) and supported (other public cloud provider).

Looker

Looker is an Integrated end-to-end multi-cloud platform Business Intelligence tool, which also plays important role in Hybrid Cloud journey of google.

It connects, analyze, and visualize data across Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, on-premises databases, or ISV SaaS applications with equal ease at high scale, with the reliability and trust of Google Cloud.

How it provides connectivity

How the Configuration would be managed when there are multiple private and public clouds are connected,

Cloud interconnect Now named as connect fill that space becoming a centralized config management having an integration wit GKE deployed.
Stackdriver just like open-sourced Prometheus is able to give a centralized logging and monitoring for all the Stacks deployed.
GCP Marketplace connectivity enables already built microservice applications to onboard on other public clouds as well as private cloud

Istio

Google only open-sourced Istio as well for Service meshing capabilities , That remains intact with GKE whether its on-prem or Own GCP.

2) Why Anthos

Features:-

ØModernize anywhere :

Modernize your applications on premises, or in the cloud.

ØMigrate :

Use Anthos Migrate to move and convert workloads directly into containers in (GKE). Target workloads can include physical servers and VMs running on-premises

ØSecurity and Policy everywhere :

Automate policy and security for On-prem, cloud or/and hybrid Kubernetes deployments.

ØConsistent experience :

Anthos gives you one unified platform that you can run anywhere.

ØPortability and no lock-in :

Built on open source technology like Kubernetes; so it’s portable, consistent, and extensible.

ØUnified management :

Anthos provides a unified management experience across environments (on-prem & cloud).

ØLower TCO :

Flexible, predictable subscription based pricing and lower TCO

Learn Easily:-

Anthos Developer Sandbox is available at no cost, to anyone with a Google account!

https://anthos-sandbox.dev

Competitive Pricing:-

Pricing | Anthos | Google Cloud

"type": "thumb-down", "id": "hardToUnderstand", "label":"Hard to understand" },{ "type": "thumb-down", "id"…

cloud.google.com

Anthos Services

Anthos Supports ML

Many organizations would like to leverage the Google Cloud AI capabilities even while working in the Hybrid Cloud environment.

3) Where and How to connect Anthos?

Anthos on Bare-metal (GA on 30th Nov’2020)

These are the simple steps, taken from Google trainings, Tech Jams, blogs and Webinars, Which are needed to establish the on-prem connectivity’s:-

References shared below:-

Anthos with VMWare over bare-metal

After implementing all above steps, You would be able to see the below GCP Console having unified view of the various cloud GKE implemented now visible under single umbrella:-

a) Bare-metal

b) AWS

c) GCP itself

Anthos Ready Partner

Google Anthos have already partnered with various vendors based on 3 categories:-

1.Anthos ready platforms

Anthos Ready Platform partners who have validated Anthos on their solution stack. In addition, they have provided solution briefs, giving mutual customers a choice of hardware based on their storage, memory, and performance needs.

2. Anthos ready storages

CSI is a way for vendors to expose their block and file storage systems to Contain Orchestration Systems (COs). Through this process, Google is validating the vendor’s storage systems. Anthos Ready Storage qualification ensures that our Partners’ CSI drivers can provide a seamless integrated experience between Anthos GKE, and the Partners’ block/file storage system.

3. Anthos ready Networking

Anthos customers want the freedom to choose their networking provider and leverage existing investments in on-premises network infrastructure. Anthos manual load balancing mode helps to bring load balancer support to Anthos.

*Anthos ready initiative is also open for customer who wish to join in above 3 categories.

Conclusion

That’s all from this article perspective, Keep exploring various Multi-Cloud Solution in depth, If you like to see more relative articles, You could check suggested articles of mine, Next I would come up with some comparative Managed K8s solution.

You can also connect me over LinkedIn in case you wish:-

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaibhav16dec/