Anthos clusters on bare metal, a component of Google Distributed Cloud Virtual (GDC Virtual), is software that brings Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to your on-premises data centers. With Anthos clusters on bare metal, you can create, manage, and upgrade Kubernetes clusters on your own hardware in your own data center.
Why Anthos clusters on bare metal?
Anthos clusters on bare metal takes advantage of your existing enterprise infrastructure, and helps you modernize applications throughout their lifecycle.
Bring your own node
Anthos clusters on bare metal lets you deploy applications directly on your own hardware infrastructure, so it can deliver the best performance and flexibility.
Because you are using your own hardware and network, you have direct control over application scale, security, and network latency, as well as having the benefit of containerized applications through Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Anthos components.
Improved performance and lowered cost
Anthos clusters on bare metal manages application deployment and health across existing corporate data centers for more efficient operation, and at the edge of the network, so analytic apps can run with full performance.
Without a virtual machine, Anthos clusters on bare metal can also manage application containers on a wide variety of performance optimized hardware types, like GPUs, and allows for direct application access to hardware.
Compatible security
Because you control your node environment, you can optimize your network, hardware, and applications to meet your specific requirements. As a result, you can directly control system security, without having to worry about your compatibility with virtual machines and operating systems.
Monitored application deployment
Anthos clusters on bare metal provides advanced monitoring of the health and performance of your environment, so you can more easily scale up applications while maintaining reliability despite fluctuations in workload and network traffic.
You manage monitoring, logging, and analysis of clusters and workloads through Connect.
Network latency and flexibility
Because you manage your network requirements, your network can be optimized for low latency, and this can be crucial for performance in commercial or finance analytics, as well as other enterprise or network edge applications.
Highly available
Anthos clusters on bare metal includes support for multiple control nodes in a cluster, so if a master node goes down you can still administer your environment.
Secure design and control
Your infrastructure security can be customized for your own needs, with minimal connections to outside resources. Most importantly, there is no additional VM complexity when deploying security systems, and you maintain complete OS transparency when interacting with existing security systems.
Anthos clusters on bare metal also works with lightweight secure connections to Google APIs, and allows you to manage clusters and applications from a central place with Connect and Cloud Monitoring. This centralization also helps keep your deployments running smoothly, and lets Google support troubleshoot issues more effectively.
Preflight checks on installation
Anthos clusters on bare metal runs on open source and enterprise Linux systems, and on a minimal hardware infrastructure, and so is flexible in your environment. Anthos clusters on bare metal also includes a variety of pre-flight checks to help ensure successful configurations and installations.
Application deployment and load balancing
Anthos clusters on bare metal includes Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing mechanisms at cluster creation.
Improved etcd reliability
To monitor the size and defragment etcd databases, Anthos clusters on bare metal
control planes include an etcddefrag pod to reclaim storage from large
etcd databases and recover etcd when disk space is exceeded.