Anthos on-prem and on bare metal now power Google Distributed Cloud Virtual

Last year, we announced Google Distributed Cloud (GDC), a portfolio of hardware, software, and services that will bring our infrastructure to the edge and into your data centers. In March, Google Distributed Cloud Edge became generally available to deliver an integrated hardware and software solution for new telco and enterprise edge workloads. And today, we are pleased to share our next update for Google Distributed Cloud Virtual — a software-and services-only solution that brings our existing Anthos on-prem (for VMware vSphere and Anthos bare metal services) into the GDC portfolio under this unified new product family. 

Customers of Anthos on-premises (now known as GDC Virtual) will continue to enjoy the consistent management and developer experience they have come to know and expect, with no changes to current capabilities, pricing structure, or look and feel across user interfaces and will continue to see consistent roadmap additions. For customers just getting to know GDC Virtual, its capabilities will round out our GDC Edge and Hosted offerings which are designed to accelerate your cloud transformation.  

Taken together, the Google Distributed Cloud portfolio for Edge, Hosted, and Virtual provides a uniform set of experiences for development, security, and management across any IT environment you choose, backed by a common Anthos API. This includes the ability to select across system form factor types, choosing between software only or integrated hardware and software solutions, and whether you prefer to be self or fully managed, by Google or another trusted partner. Based on your unique business and workload needs, you choose the scenario that works best for your organization.

Cloud-managed and deployed onto your infrastructure, GDC Virtual provides a software only extension of Google Cloud allowing you to: 

• Automate provisioning and management of GKE clusters on VMs and existing bare metal infrastructure with the requirements and form factors you choose and use the Google Cloud Console to provision Anthos clusters on vSphere

• Enable developers to build and deploy container-based workloads to Kubernetes directly or an application runtime

• Apply federated security, access control, and identity management across cloud and on-premises clusters

To further illustrate these capabilities, here are some examples of where customers might choose to deploy GDC Virtual. 

• A customer has  a significant investment in their own VM environment. Selecting GDC  Virtual enables them to leverage their existing infrastructure to run new and modernized applications.

• A customer wants to bring advanced AI/ML workloads into each store. Given the need to deploy in their establishments, they have specific requirements for footprint and hardware.  With GDC Virtual, the new workloads can be deployed on hardware and in a footprint that meets their specific needs.

• A large auto manufacturer is on a journey to migrate their applications to the cloud.  As part of this journey, they are leveraging their existing on-premises investments. By choosing GDC Virtual, they would be able to  modernize applications in-place  before migrating to the cloud.

GDC Virtual Adoption is Growing Rapidly 

We built Anthos three years ago to deliver a consistent cloud operational model and developer experience, and adoption has continued to grow exponentially. In fact, between 2021 and 2022, the number of customers for Anthos products grew by over five times. This includes Anthos bare metal customers (now Google GDC Virtual) growing by over four times over that same period. Now customers have more ways to consume Anthos - GDC Edge, Virtual, and Hosted - which are all powered by Anthos. Some notable customers include:

TELUS - For TELUS, a leading provider of communications and technology, Anthos on-premises capabilities help enable their new Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) use cases. This new Telco edge solution, moves the processing and management of traffic from a centralized cloud to the edge of TELUS’ 5G network, making it possible to deploy applications and process content closer to its customers, and thus yielding several benefits including better performance, security, and customization. This includes enabling a new Connected Worker Safety solution that can be applied across a range of business verticals to help improve safety, prevent injury, and save lives. More details on this solution can be found here.  

Major League Baseball (MLB) - MLB supports 30 teams spread across the US and Canada, running workloads in the cloud and at the edge with on-premises data centers at each of their ballparks. By using Anthos, they can containerize those workloads and run them in the location that makes the most sense for the application. In particular, this enables scenarios where local computing needs to occur in the park for latency reasons, such as delivering stats in the stadium, to fans, or to broadcast, or to the scoreboard. This has enabled data democratization and distribution to its 30 teams and can support improved time to insight and fan engagement.

Google Corporate Engineering - With Anthos, Google Corporate Engineering is working to make operations consistent and to reduce costs across Google Cloud and on-prem distributed cloud environments by using common tooling. In 2021, Google began running its first production workloads in edge environments at corporate offices with Anthos Bare Metal and in 2022 added the first production workloads in hosted data centers. By the end of the year Google plans to have a sizable portion of our virtualized platform migrated to GDC Virtual; this final migration will include a number of enterprise workloads that are critical for the operation of our company, including security, financials, and IT. 

Freedom of choice with Google Distributed Cloud

To us, supporting our customers’ transformation requirements means providing a Google Distributed Cloud portfolio that embraces openness and choice. GDC Virtual offers a new consumption model for customers built upon a proven Anthos stack as a software only deployment option on your infrastructure. This enables modernization efforts to progress in place at a pace that makes sense for your business. 

With this update for GDC Virtual, the Google Distributed Cloud portfolio can now enable consistent operations from on-premises, to edge, to cloud. 

To learn more about GDC Virtual check out the Google Distributed Cloud website. Current Google Cloud customers can also learn about Google Distributed Cloud by adding Anthos Service Mesh and Config Management to their GKE clusters today!