Last April, Google Cloud announced Anthos – a new platform for modernizing applications and accelerating hybrid cloud adoption. As a platform, Anthos allows you to run an app anywhere with the simplicity, flexibility and security needed for today’s IT world. This hybrid functionality is achieved by using the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to containerize applications and run them in the cloud or on-premises using GKE On-Prem.
Since then, Anthos has continued to evolve, both with support of major hardware and software vendors like Cisco, as well as adding more features and functionalities that make the platform better. If you haven’t kept up with the recent announcements, here’s a handy summary of what’s new and why it’s exciting.
Anthos Service Mesh
Many organizations want to use microservices architectures as a way to modernize their applications. However, moving from monolithic applications to a large number of microservices increases operational complexity. To counteract such complexity, you can implement a service mesh—an abstraction layer that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, monitor and manage microservices. Announced in September in Beta form, Anthos Service Mesh is an Anthos-tested and supported distribution of Istio that enables you to create and deploy a fully supported service mesh on Google Cloud or on GKE On-Prem. This allows for managed, observable and secure communication across services and provides a bridge between on-premises and cloud infrastructures for robust, resilient enterprise applications no matter where they (or their services) run.
Cloud Run
In November of last year, Cloud Run, a managed Knative service, became generally available. Cloud Run empowers developers to focus on writing high-value code no matter where their businesses are in their cloud journey, whether that's on-prem, operating in a managed Kubernetes environment, or running on a fully managed serverless computing platform. Cloud Run allows you to run stateless HTTP-driven containers without worrying about the infrastructure. Cloud Run for Anthos allows those Cloud Run applications to be deployed into an Anthos GKE cluster running on-premises or in Google Cloud. Application developers can deploy their applications anywhere, giving you the flexibility you need, regardless of where you are in your cloud journey.
Apigee Hybrid
Many enterprises are increasingly adopting API-first approaches to connecting services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments to drive both innovation and application modernization. In November, Google announced Apigee Hybrid to help with hybrid API management. Apigee Hybrid gives organizations the flexibility to deploy API runtimes in a hybrid environment while using cloud-based Apigee capabilities such as developer portals, API monitoring and analytics. Apigee Hybrid can be deployed as a workload on Anthos, so you enjoy the benefits of an integrated Google Cloud stack along with Antho automation and security benefits.
Cloud Code and Skaffold
For those interested in developing cloud-native or Kubernetes-native applications that can run on the Anthos platform, Google announced the general availability of Skaffold in November. Skaffold simplifies common operational tasks that you perform when doing Kubernetes development, letting you focus on your code changes and see them rapidly reflected on your cluster. It's the underlying engine that drives Cloud Code, and a powerful tool in and of itself for improving developer productivity.
Migrate for Anthos
Right on the heels of the Cloud Run, Apigee Hybrid, and Skaffold announcements, Migrate for Anthos also became generally available in December. Many organizations want to move existing applications to the cloud, but those applications have been around a long time, and your IT department may not have the application-specific knowledge required to rewrite them to be more cloud-native. Or even if such expertise exists, it might be very time-consuming or costly (or both!) to rebuild them. Sound familiar? Well Migrate for Anthos helps solve that problem. Migrate for Anthos quickly and easily modernizes your existing applications with a service that encapsulates them in a container. You can move your physical servers and existing VMs into Kubernetes containers, giving you better portability and resource utilization without have to change the underlying application.
Given how much development Google and their partners have done with the Anthos platform in such a short time, this is definitely an application modernization and hybrid cloud solution you should be considering! If you’d like to know more about how Anthos and co-developed solutions from Cisco can modernize applications and accelerate your cloud transformation at your own pace, why not give IGNW a call? We have both the knowledge and expertise to help!