Anthos—driving business agility and efficiency

In business as in life, change is constant and unpredictable. When building the platforms to power your organization, you can’t be limited by yesterday’s technology decisions. Nor can the systems you create today constrain your ability to act tomorrow. In times of uncertainty, you need an architecture that gives you the agility and flexibility you need to help you weather change—or even take advantage of it.  

Since first announcing Anthos, our multi-cloud and hybrid application platform, just under two years ago, we’ve been continuously delivering new capabilities to help organizations of all sizes develop, deploy, and manage applications more quickly and flexibly. Today, we are expanding Anthos to support more kinds of workloads, in more kinds of environments, in many more locations. With these announcements, we look forward to helping you build applications that can thrive in any environment. 

“When you’ve been around as long as KeyBank has—nearly 200 years—we know a thing or two about keeping up with the pace of change,” said Keith Silvestri, CTO, KeyBank. “Anthos is a true differentiator for us in terms of releases and a cornerstone to our agile methodology. With our ability to flex between on-prem and public clouds, our team can now spend less time managing the complex tasks of using multiple clouds and focus on ways we can serve our clients today.”

More clouds, more options

Enterprises know they need the cloud to help drive cost efficiency and digital transformation. Last year, we announced our multi-cloud vision, and previewed Anthos running and managing applications on AWS. Today, we are excited to announce that Anthos support for multi-cloud is generally available. Now, you can consolidate all your operations across on-premises, Google Cloud, and other clouds starting with AWS (support for Microsoft Azure is currently in preview). 

The flexibility to run applications where you need them without added complexity has been a key factor in choosing Anthos—many customers want to continue to use their existing investments both on-premises as well as in other clouds, and having a common management layer helps their teams deliver quality services with low overhead. 

Often our customers look to this flexibility for their teams to work across platforms and the freedom from lock in it provides. One such early adopter is Plaid, a Japanese tech company providing real-time visibility into user activity online. Plaid’s customers rely on their always-available analytics service to make changes in real-time and continuously improve the user experience.    

"At Plaid we provide real-time data analysis of over 6.8 billion online users. Our customers rely on us to be always available and as a result we have very high reliability requirements,” said Naohiko Takemura, PLAID Inc., Head of Engineering. “We pursued a multi-cloud strategy to ensure redundancy for our critical KARTE service. Google Cloud’s Anthos works seamlessly across GCP and our other cloud providers preventing any business disruption. Thanks to Anthos, we prevent vendor lock-in, avoid managing cloud-specific infrastructure, and our developers are not constrained by cloud providers." 

Indeed, adopting multi-cloud can be a particularly valuable strategy in times of uncertainty, analysts say. 

“In times of disruption, the effective use of and easy access to innovative, yet resilient, technology anywhere and everywhere is critical”, said Richard Villars, Vice President, Datacenter & Cloud, IDC. “While the initial goal may be to achieve short-term cost savings, the long term benefits of aligning technology adoption and IT operational governance with business outcomes will ultimately ensure ongoing success. Solutions like Google’s Anthos enable the cost effective extension of cloud capabilities across on-premises and cloud-based resources while also enabling organizations to tap into the new developer services that they’ll need to continue innovating in their businesses.” 

One management experience for all your applications

Whether your organization is a born-in-the-cloud digital native or a traditional enterprise, it can be hard to manage workloads consistently, and at scale. This is especially true for traditional enterprises with lots of legacy workloads. With this latest release, we are making managing diverse environments easier than ever before, with deeper support for virtual machines, letting you extend Anthos’ management framework to the types of workloads that make up the vast majority of existing systems. 

Specifically, Anthos now lets you manage two of the most complex pieces of traditional workloads:

• Policy and configuration management—With Anthos Config Management, you can now use a programmatic and declarative approach to manage policies for your VMs on Google Cloud just as you do for your containers. This reduces the likelihood of configuration errors due to manual intervention while speeding up time to delivery. In the meantime, the platform ensures your applications are running with the desired state at all times. 

• Managing services on heterogeneous deployments —Over the coming months Anthos Service Mesh will also include support for applications running in virtual machines, letting you consistently manage security and policy across different workloads in Google Cloud, on-premises and in other clouds. 

These are just two examples of how Anthos can help you reduce risk and complexity associated with managing traditional workloads. Stay tuned in the coming months as we discuss other ways you can use Anthos as a single management framework for your various virtual machines and cloud environments. 

Driving efficiency with Anthos

In addition to deployment flexibility, Anthos can also help you drive out costs and inefficiency from your environment. Later this year you’ll be able to run Anthos with no third-party hypervisor, delivering even better performance, further reducing costs and eliminating the management overhead of yet another vendor relationship. This is also great for demanding workloads that require bare metal for performance or regulatory reasons. 

Bare metal also powers Anthos at the edge, letting you deploy workloads beyond your data center and public cloud environments to wherever you need it. Whether it’s a retail store, branch office, or even remote sites, Anthos can help you bring your applications closer to your end users, for optimal performance. 

Finally, we are further simplifying application modernization with Migrate for Anthos, which lets you reduce costs and improve performance without having to rearchitect or replatform your workloads manually. With this latest release, you can simplify day-two operations and integrate migrated workloads with other Anthos services. You can learn more here.

Building the future 

This is a time of great uncertainty. Enterprises need an application platform that embraces the technology choices they’ve already made, and gives them the flexibility they need to adapt to what comes next. Google Cloud and our partners are here to help you with your journey.

“No customer I've ever talked to said ‘give me less flexibility.’ Being able to run Anthos on AWS gives customers even more options for designing a platform that’s right for their needs—especially in difficult times,” said Miles Ward, CTO, SADA. “No matter if you're focused on keeping up with increasing demand, leveraging existing investments or getting closer to customers to reach them in new ways, this is a great step forward for the intercloud.” 

Whether you run your workloads in Google Cloud, on-prem, or in third-party cloud providers, Anthos provides a consistent platform on which your teams can build great applications that can thrive in a changing environment.

You can learn more about how Anthos has been helping our customers gain flexibility while making a positive economic impact through application modernization, here.