Laying my hands on Anthos — what it is, and what it’s not..

tl;dr — Anthos is to Kubernetes what Kubernetes is to containers. And more.

During KubeCon 2019 in Barcelona I was lucky enough to get hands-on experience with Google Cloud’s latest and greatest: Anthos. The room was packed with attendees as of 8AM and guidance provided by a dozen of knowledgeable Googlers who have worked close on or with Anthos. Still in whitelist alpha at the time of writing, Anthos gives you the freedom to manage your hybrid fleet of Kubernetes cluster.

This blog post will not go into all the sales topics and marketing campaigns running around Anthos. It will instead focus on the technical aspects of Anthos and what it can do for you. Let’s go full steam ahead!

What it’s not

It might be good to start with scoping what Anthos is not. It’s not a way to bring Cloud Services to your on-prem environment. Don’t expect to run BigQuery, Container Registry or App Engine on your own hardware. With one exception, being GKE on-prem. This neat service allows you to leverage your on-prem hardware to run Kubernetes, while benefiting from the advantages of a managed service like Google Kubernetes Engine.

So what is it?

Anthos is to Kubernetes what Kubernetes is to containers. And more. When you create a Deployment in Kubernetes, K8S makes sure your Pods always match the desired state. A pod crashes? Kubernetes will schedule a new one, to get from the actual state into the desired state. Kubernetes does that in a declarative way, as an end user you probably let Kubernetes know what you’d like by using YAML files.

Just the same, Anthos is a platform that will manage your Kubernetes clusters for you. It does 3 things, and it does them well:

• Infrastructure provisioning in both cloud and on-premises.
• Infrastructure management tooling, security, policies and compliance solutions.
• Streamlined application development, service discovery and telemetry, service management, and workload migration from on-premises to cloud.

You tell Anthos how you want your Kubernetes clusters to look like, and it will make sure your demands are met. The great thing here is that those different clusters are not limited to GKE clusters. With the Anthos GKE Connect Agent installed on your Kubernetes cluster, that cluster can reside anywhere, as long as it can connect to Anthos.

So how does it work?

Great question! I was just getting to that. You start with a Git repo (either Github or GSR for now) where you manage your YAML files, the desired state of your environment. This GitOps way of working is getting more and more traction, so it’s great to see this as the default flow in Anthos.

Want to read more about how Anthos works and can help you get started with SRE, providing SLI’s, SLO’s and SLA’s?
continue reading on our blogpost