How does Anthos simplify hybrid & multicloud deployments?

Most enterprises have applications in disparate locations—in their own data centers, in multiple public clouds, and at the edge. These apps run on different proprietary technology stacks, which reduces developer velocity, wastes computing resources, and hinders scalability. How can you consistently secure and operate existing apps, while developing and deploying new apps across hybrid and multicloud environments? How can you get centralized visibility and management of the resources? Well, that is why Anthos exists!

This post explores why traditional hybrid and multicloud deployments are difficult, and then shows how Anthos makes it easy to manage applications across multiple environments. 

Why is traditional hybrid and multicloud difficult?

In hybrid and multicloud environments, you need to manage infrastructure. Let’s say you use containers on the clouds, and you develop apps using services on Google Cloud and AWS. Regardless of environment, you will need policy enforcement across your IT footprint. To manage your apps across the environment, you need monitoring and logging systems. You need to integrate that data into meaningful categories, like business data, operational data, and alerts.

Digging further, you might use operational data and alerts to inform optimizations, implement automations, and set policies or SLOs. You might use business data to do all those things, and to deploy third-party apps. Then, to actually enact the changes you decide to implement, you need to act on different parts of the system. That means digging into each tool for policy enforcement, securing services, orchestrating containers, and managing infrastructure. Don't forget, all of this work is in addition to what it takes to develop and deploy your own apps.

Now, consider repeating this set of tasks across a hybrid and multicloud landscape. It becomes very complex, very quickly. Your platform admins, SREs,  and DevOps teams who are responsible for security and efficiency have to do manual, cluster-by-cluster management, data collection, and information synthesis. With this complexity, it’s hard to stay current, to understand business implications, and to ensure compliance (not to mention the difficulty of onboarding a new hire). Anthos helps solve these challenges!

How does Anthos make hybrid and multicloud easy?

With Anthos, you get a consistent way to manage your infrastructure, with similar infrastructure management, container management, service management, and policy enforcement across your landscape.

As a result, you have observability across all your platforms in one place, including access to business information, alerts, and operations information. With this information you might decide to optimize, automate, and set policies or SLOs. 

Digging deeper into Anthos 

Fleets

You may have different regions that need different policies, and also have different development, staging, or production environments that need different permissions. Some parts of your work may need more security. That's where Fleets come in! Fleets are a way to create logical sets of underlying Kubernetes clusters, regardless of which platform those clusters live on. 

By considering, grouping, and managing sets of clusters as logical fleets, you can think about and work with your applications at the right level of detail for what you need to do, be it acquiring business insights over the entire system, updating settings for a dev environment, or troubleshooting data for a specific cluster. Using Fleets, each part of the functional stack can take declarative direction about configuration, compliance, and more.

Modernize application development

Anthos also helps modernize application development because it uses fleets to enforce policies and processes, and abstracts away the cluster and container management from application teams. Anthos enables you to easily abstract away infrastructure from application teams, making it easy for them to incorporate a wide variety of CI/CD solutions on top of fleets.  It lets you view and manage your applications at the right level of detail, be it business insights for services across the entire system, or troubleshooting data for a specific cluster. Anthos also works with container-based tools like buildpacks to simplify the packaging process. It offers Migrate for Anthos to take those applications out of the VMs and move them to a more modern hosting environment. 

What’s in it for platform administrators? 

Anthos provides platform administrators a single place to monitor and manage their landscape, with policy control and marketplace access. This reduces person-hours needed for management, enforcement, discovery, and communication. Anthos also provides administrators an out-of-the-box structured view of their entire system, including services, clusters, and more, so they can improve security, use resources more efficiently, and demonstrate measurable success. Administrators also save time and effort by managing declaratively, and they can communicate the success, cost savings, and efficiency of the platforms without needing to manually combine data. 

Interested in getting started with Anthos? Check out the free on-demand training here and my YouTube series. 

For more resources, you can also read the Anthos ebook at no cost. For more #GCPSketchnote and similar cloud content, follow me on twitter @pvergadia and keep an eye out on thecloudgirl.dev