Anthos in depth: exploring a bare-metal deployment option

We recently shared how organizations are modernizing their applications with Anthos, driving business agility and efficiency in exciting new ways. But while some of you want to run Anthos on your existing virtualized infrastructure, others want to eliminate the dependency on a hypervisor layer, to modernize your applications while reducing costs. A new option to run Anthos on bare metal later this year will let you do just that. 

Anthos on bare metal is a deployment option to run Anthos on physical servers, deployed on an operating system provided by you, without a hypervisor layer. Anthos on bare metal will ship with built-in networking, lifecycle management, diagnostics, health checks, logging, and monitoring. Additionally it will support CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Ubuntu—all validated by Google. With Anthos on bare metal, you can use your company’s standard hardware and operating system images, taking advantage of existing investments, which are automatically checked and validated against Anthos infrastructure requirements. 

We are also extending our existing Anthos Ready Partner Initiative to include bare metal solutions. This will include reference architectures on how to integrate Anthos with many datacenter technologies such as servers, networking, and storage using our Anthos Ready partner qualification process.

Reduce cost and complexity

Over the years, virtualization has helped organizations increase the efficiency of their physical servers, but it has also introduced additional cost and management complexity. With containers becoming mainstream, there’s an opportunity to reduce the costs associated with licensing a hypervisor, while also reducing the architecture and management overhead of operating hundreds of VMs. 

That’s on top of the efficiencies that Anthos already brings to the table, even when it’s installed in a virtual machine. Anthos can simplify your application architecture, reduce costs, and decrease time spent learning new skills. In fact, the recent Forrester Total Economic Impact report found that Anthos enables a 40% to 55% increase in platform operations efficiency.

Run closer to the hardware for better performance

Mission critical applications often demand the highest levels of performance and lowest latency from the compute, storage, and networking stack. By removing the latency introduced by the hypervisor layer, Anthos on bare metal lets you run even computationally intensive applications such as GPU-based video processing, machine learning, etc., in a CAPEX and OPEX effective manner. This means that you can access all the benefits of Anthos—centralized management, increased flexibility, and developer agility—for your most demanding applications. 

Unlock new use cases for edge computing

In general, running your applications closer to your customers reduces latency and improves their experience. The availability of Anthos on bare metal servers lets you extend Anthos to new locations such as edge locations and telco sites. Our telco and edge partners welcome the advent of a bare metal option, as it allows them to run Anthos on specialized edge hardware. At the same time, you can still manage any applications you deploy to Anthos edge locations through the Google Cloud Console, complete with integrated monitoring and policy enforcement. You can also apply consistent policies and enforce them across all locations of application deployments. Visit Anthos at the Edge solutions page and learn more about how Anthos on bare metal is also helping customers with applications deployed at the edge locations. 

We developed Anthos to help all organizations to tackle multi-cloud, taking advantage of modern cloud-native technologies like containers,  serverless, service mesh, and consistent policy management; both in the cloud or on-premises. Now, with the option of running Anthos on bare metal, there are even more ways to enjoy the benefits of this modern cloud application stack. Learn more by downloading the Anthos under the hood ebook and get started on your modernization journey today!