Anthos in depth: What new AWS multi-cloud support means for you

Last week we announced new features for Anthos that our customers tell us will drive business agility and efficiency. Today, we’d like to dive a bit deeper into one of Anthos’ most exciting new features: support for multi-cloud. Now, you can use Anthos to consolidate all your operations across on-premises, Google Cloud, and other clouds (starting with AWS).

Getting multi-cloud right

Many of you deploy workloads to multiple clouds to take advantage of best-of-breed capabilities and improve the resiliency of your services. But managing applications across different clouds is easier said than done. I’ve heard from many of you that the specialized skill sets required for multi-cloud deployments lead to siloed, disconnected, teams—even if those teams are working on the same application. Despite these challenges, concerns about lock-in to one cloud provider and availability in the case of an outage make succeeding with multi-cloud a priority for many of you.

Taking advantage of an open application modernization platform like Anthos can help ease some of those challenges and enable you to modernize your existing applications, build new ones, and run them anywhere. According to a new app modernization survey from Enterprise Strategy Group, “92% of organizations feel it is important to utilize a multi-cloud enabled container management and orchestration solution.“¹ 

Let’s take a deeper look at how Anthos can help you build a successful multi-cloud strategy. 

Enabling consistency across multiple clouds

Disjointed management tools slow down teams, waste valuable time and money, and ultimately lead to reduced employee productivity. Anthos layers on top of Kubernetes and brings consistency to orchestration and policy enforcement across multiple clouds and on-premises. With the same open software experience across all environments, your platform teams can move faster while your security teams maintain consistent controls, all while reducing both complexity and your exposed attack surface. 

Anthos lets you take a holistic view of your services running across a multi-cloud architecture. Anthos Service Mesh manages, and secures, traffic running in your data center, on Google Cloud and on other clouds such as AWS. Anthos Config Management allows you to distribute and enforce hierarchical policies (such as authorization, resource quotas, and limits for namespaces) at scale across multiple apps running in multiple clouds. In short, Anthos frees you from cloud provider constraints and gives you the tools to run your applications anywhere.

When you’re developing your application, Anthos helps by providing a “build once, deploy anywhere” platform so you can take your applications to multiple public clouds, starting with AWS. Regardless of the environment for which your app was developed, Anthos gives you the same development experience. You spend less time focused on the tool chain, configuration, and management of your app, and more time writing great code. 

Empowering you with flexibility and choice

But we also know that trusting a new cloud vendor with your critical workloads is not a decision you take lightly. That’s why we made getting started with Anthos for AWS as seamless as possible. If your team has built processes and tooling around your AWS practice, those teams can install Anthos directly into your existing AWS VPC and reuse your existing AWS security groups and IAM resources. To make your services accessible to other services within your organization, or publicly accessible to your users, you can also expose them using AWS load balancers.

Anthos multi-cloud features available today

Support for Anthos for AWS is generally available. This release includes several of the top features that you have been asking for, bringing a variety of benefits:

1. High reliability: Your clusters can be deployed in a high availability (HA) configuration, where both control plane instances, as well as node pools, can be placed across multiple availability zones. AWS Auto Scaling groups are also used for resiliency.

2. Auto-scaling: Automatically resize your number of nodes based on traffic volumes so you are only paying for the resources you need.

3. Integration with an existing AWS environment: Anthos can be deployed into your existing AWS VPCs, and you can leverage existing security groups to secure those clusters. If your existing AWS setup has been approved by your security team, you can deploy Anthos into it, as long as the firewalls allow connections back to Google. You can also expose services via AWS load balancers so deploying Anthos is easy and configuration of the environment is minimal.

4. Operational consistency: Now, you can manage workloads running on Google Cloud as well as AWS from one place. The Google Cloud Console provides single-pane-of-glass management for all your clusters. Additionally, system logs for all these environments can be stored in Cloud Logging (formerly Stackdriver).

5. Integration with the full Anthos stack: You can set policy on your AWS workloads with Anthos Config Management, and use Anthos Service Mesh to securely connect and manage your resources running in AWS so your policies and monitoring have a view of your entire application and not just a silo of one part.

To support more of your multi-cloud plans, we’re also offering support for Anthos for Azure later this year.

Ensuring success in the new multi-cloud future

Multi-cloud can ensure your teams can develop and build across environments, pivot quickly, and keep your applications running if disaster strikes. Anthos makes multi-cloud easy by providing a single pane of glass for management and ensures that it is done right with a consistent, integrated, experience for your developers, operators, and administrators. 

This message rings true for our partners, who report that Anthos’ approach to multi-cloud is resonating with their customers.

“We’re seeing very positive feedback from the early adopters of Anthos on AWS,” said Kyle Bassett, Partner at Arctiq. “Anthos sets itself apart with the ability to provide a full-stack cloud-agnostic Kubernetes experience from low-level resource management all the way up to policy enforcement—all while providing an enhanced developer experience. For customers committed to containers but tired of managing everything themselves, Anthos does the heavy lifting for you.” 

If you’re looking to get started with Anthos for AWS, we have partners including Arctiq, IGNW, SADA, SoftServe, and World Wide Technology that are eager to help. And if you are interested in seeing how Anthos can help your organization get multi-cloud right, please reach out to our sales team to schedule an architecture design session.

^{1. ESG Custom Research Survey, Measuring App Modernization and its Impact, Commissioned by Google, March 2020.}