Google Anthos: how it has changed DevOps

Google Anthos is a game-changing platform for DevOps. Here`s why.

Max Kozinenko, Solutions Architect at SoftServe, embraced Google Anthos as an experiment right after it was released in spring 2019. Now, 1,5 years later, he`s Google Anthos Cluster Lead. Having implemented 5 projects together with the team of engineers from SoftServe Development Centers from Kharkiv, Kyiv and Lviv, he`s sure that this technology is a breakthrough.

Here are Max`s thoughts on that.

Few words on what Anthos is and what pet peeves it eliminates for enterprises?

Managing all existing infrastructure environments may be quite a nightmare for a company, especially enterprise, with no easy solution how to get from point A to point B. Often this path is long, expensive and impeding overall business growth.

Anthos is an ecosystem, that provides the solution.

It gives a full control over a company`s infrastructure. Its every object is treated as a Kubernetes object and managed using the GitOps workflow.

These are the crucial advantages, why companies will eventually go for Anthos:

• Allows managing different environments: AWS, GCP, on-premises,
• Gives a full control over the whole infrastructure,
• Enables changing environment configuration quicker and easier.

But it`s not only a client who wins.

Wins for engineers. How Anthos makes DevOps` lives easier?

It`s a DevOps nightmare to containerize some complex setup, as it`s too time- and efforts-consuming

Here is how Migration for Anthos (M4A) can be integrated into current CI/CD pipeline:

Much simpler, right?

The result won`t be the ideally looking containerized application like after replatforming, yet workflow will be containerized.

It comes in handy when you are expected to do a quick lift&shift. This time saving allows to have ROI increased. Then you`ll able to invest time and money into optimization.

That`s the main use case where M4A is applicable.

Workloads, currently supported by M4A

As for Windows apps, keep in mind, that it produces Windows containers, that can`t be added to a Service Mesh. So, it`s very tricky to set up a Service Mesh between a standard Linux and Windows containers as you`ll spend a lot of time on designing how they should communicate via the Istio Ingress. On top of that, you won`t be able to utilize all the Service Mesh features in Windows Containers.

But for LAMP, WordPress, Java-based apps this approach gives a huge advantage.

Opportunity to control all the workloads from a single place

Here is how it looks:

This is a GKE cluster hub, that unites all your workloads and gives a single point of view on all the clusters, registered here. It`s not only about Google Cloud projects, but on-premise and AWS as well (Azure will be added in the immediate future).

Here you can:

• track everything (issues, warnings, alertings etc.) easily in a centralized way,
• manage all the Anthos features like configuration management, Service Mesh,
• use Ingress for Anthos or Multicluster services.

Load balancing

Ingress for Anthos utilizes the Google Network backbone to do the intelligent drawing of the inbound traffic.

As you can see on the scheme below, Ingress utilizes Google Front-end. It gets a Google request from a specific area to a single virtual IP and then this request is routed to the closest Google Front-end and gets routed to the closest cluster in terms of latency.

The most convenient integration with other cloud environments

As I`ve mentioned above, Anthos is integrated with AWS. It means that we get here the GKE experience with the operability, manageability etc.

There are other similar tools like Kops, AKS or simply Kubernetes on AWS to eliminate the complexity aspects.

Here are 6 key factors why Anthos gives a better experience:

• Turn-key, production-grade, conformant Kubernetes with best-practice configuration,
• Easy upgrade path to the latest Kubernetes releases that have been validated and supported by Google,
• Get started quickly: use the GCP Cloud Console as the single pane of glass to create and view your workloads,
• GitOps-style day 2 management for all your Anthos clusters with familiar tooling,
• Integrated with ACM, ASM, Cloud Run, Cloud Logging & Monitoring and marketplace solutions,
• Available and reliable: highly available control plane and node pools with support for auto-scaling.