Google Cloud Anthos Series: Anthos Platform Technical Details

Google Cloud Anthos Series: Part 2

Pushkar Kothavade

Published in

Google Cloud - Community

5 min readJan 27, 2022

Welcome to Part-2 of the ‘Google Cloud Anthos series’. You can find the complete series Here

Anthos Platform: Bringing the cloud to you

Anthos unifies the management of applications running on Kubernetes clusters across multiple regions of Google Cloud, On-premises and in multiple public clouds with a Google Cloud backed control plane for consistent operation at scale.

Anthos Unified User Interface

The Anthos dashboard in the Google Cloud Console provides users a secure, unified user interface to view and manage applications spread across multiple Kubernetes clusters. It also provides a simplified view for all Anthos resources. Find sample Anthos dashboard below.

Anthos Service Mesh

A service mesh is an architecture that enables managed, observable and secure communication across microservices, letting users create robust enterprise applications made up of many microservices. Service meshes factor out all the common concerns of running a service such as monitoring, networking and security with consistent and powerful tools. Service mesh empowers Developers and DevOps team to focus on creating and managing great applications for their users without making changes to application code.

Anthos Service Mesh is powered by Istio, a highly configurable and powerful open source service mesh platform. The service mesh monitors all traffic through a proxy. On Kubernetes platform the proxy is deployed by a sidecar pattern to the microservices in the mesh.

Anthos Config Management

Anthos Config Management is a service for configuration and policy management that combines Policy Controller, Config Sync and Config Controller. Application spanning across multiple Kubernetes environments adds complexity in terms of Governance, resource management and consistency. Anthos Config Management provides solution to address this challenge.

‘GitOps’ or ‘Configuration as code’ is one common approach to managing this complexity, allowing users to store the desired state of the hybrid / multi-cloud environment under Git version control and apply it directly with repeatable results. This approach leverages core Kubernetes concepts, such as Namespaces, labels and annotations to determine how and where to apply the config changes to all of your Kubernetes clusters, no matter where they reside. The Git repo provides a versioned, secured, and controlled single source of truth for all of your Kubernetes configurations.

Anthos Multi-Cluster Ingress

Multi Cluster Ingress is a cloud-hosted multi-cluster Ingress controller for GKE clusters. It’s a Google-hosted service that supports deploying shared load balancing resources across clusters and across regions. Multi Cluster Ingress is designed to meet the load balancing needs of multi-cluster, multi-regional environments. It’s a controller for the external HTTP(S) load balancer to provide ingress for traffic coming from the internet across one or more clusters.

Many factors drive multi-cluster topologies, including close user proximity for apps, cluster and regional high availability, security and organisational separation, cluster migration and data locality. As the reasons for multiple clusters grow, the need for a formal and productised multi-cluster platform becomes more urgent.

Anthos Logging, Monitoring & Trace

Google Cloud’s Operations suite offers Integrated monitoring, logging and trace managed services for applications and systems running on Google Cloud and beyond.

Cloud Logging is a fully managed service that performs at scale and can ingest application and platform log data, as well as custom log data from GKE environments, VMs, and other services inside and outside of Google Cloud.

Cloud Monitoring provides visibility into the performance, uptime, and overall health of cloud-powered applications. Collect metrics, events, and metadata from Google Cloud services, hosted uptime probes, application instrumentation, and a variety of common application components.

Application Performance Management (APM) combines the monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities of Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring with Cloud Trace, Cloud Debugger, and Cloud Profiler.

Anthos Marketplace Applications

A Kubernetes app is a ‘Containerized’ app that can be run on the Kubernetes cluster. The Kubernetes apps in Cloud Marketplace include container images and configuration files, such as a ‘Kubectl’ configuration or a ‘Helm chart’. When user deploys an app from Cloud Marketplace, the Kubernetes resources gets created in the cluster, and it can be managed as a group.

Anthos Cloud Run

Cloud Run for Anthos is Google’s managed and fully supported Knative offering. Cloud Run for Anthos abstracts away the complexity of Kubernetes, making it easy to build and deploy serverless workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Cloud Run is also available as a fully managed serverless platform on Google Cloud, without the Kubernetes platform requirements.