Bringing hybrid and multi-cloud to our APAC customers with Anthos

At Google Cloud Next ‘19 in April, we announced Anthos, Google Cloud’s new open platform that lets you run applications anywhere—simply, flexibly and securely. Embracing open standards, Anthos lets you run your applications unmodified on existing on-prem hardware investments or in the public cloud. Anthos also includes capabilities to help you automate policy and security at scale across your deployments using Anthos Config Management. Anthos accelerates application development by giving teams only one set of modern tools to learn, equips your business with transformational technologies like containers, service mesh and microservices, and prevents you from being locked in to a single cloud provider. 

To support these transformations, customers frequently tell us they need to be able to modernize. Having the power to modernize your workloads in place from existing on-prem data centers or with a move to the cloud is key to Google meeting you where you are. To continue supporting that flexibility, today, we are happy to report the beta availability of Migrate for Anthos, which allows you to take VMs from on-prem or Google Compute Engine and move them directly into containers running in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). We’re also expanding the list of supported sources so that you can migrate VMs directly from Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure into containers in GKE. 

With this launch, customers can now use Migrate for Anthos to automatically modernize their VMs and move them to containers without any of the complex, manual processes of traditional container modernization strategies. Our new approach gives you more flexibility to modernize your existing infrastructure investments with ease, even for VMs you’d previously written off as not being able to modernize. By making the move to containers in GKE you gain a wealth of benefits and automation, like no longer having to manually maintain and patch your OS, as one example. 

Atos, a systems integrator with a large presence in Japan, has been using Migrate for Anthos to accelerate its hybrid cloud journey. “Containers are already a part of our cloud landscape, giving us a powerful way to manage and maintain our systems as well as customer environments. At the same time, we have a lot of VMs in production and we are always looking for optimized ways of migrating these over to hybrid cloud delivery models,” said Michael Kollar, SVP for Cloud Engineering at Atos. “Migrate for Anthos gives us an additional fantastic tool in transformational projects and it will further accelerate our cloud success.'' 

Anthos Adoption in Asia Pacific

Gartner predicts that by 2021, more than 75% of midsize and large organizations will have adopted a multi-cloud and/or hybrid IT strategy¹. Organizations are taking this approach to prevent vendor lock-in and benefit from better server density, reduced management overhead, and improved management through integration with services like Stackdriver for logging, monitoring, and debugging. 

NTT Communications is one of the world’s largest telecommunications providers, and has been one of the earliest adopters of Anthos in Asia Pacific. 

“NTT Communications Corporation was one of the early customers of Anthos in Japan when it was announced in April this year. Since then, we have embarked on an interesting proof of concept (POC) with medical institutions and system integrators to analyze clinical data to see if we can improve the quality of rehabilitation programs offered to patients. Using GKE On-Prem which is part of the Anthos platform, we securely store clinical data on our Enterprise Cloud which comprises physically distributed servers connected through a closed and secure network, and access smart analysis tools to process the data,” said Akiko Kudo, Senior Vice President, Head of Fifth Sales Division.

We’re thrilled to work with our customers in Asia Pacific to help them bring their environments into the digital future. Modernizing your IT environment is a dynamic journey and will likely involve multiple strategies. Technologies like our Anthos platforms are here to help simplify that path. For more information on migrating and modernizing with Google Cloud, be sure to visit our Anthos, and Migrate for Anthos pages. Sign up here if you are interested in trying out Anthos.

_{1. Smarter With Gartner, 5 Approaches to Cloud Applications Integration, May 14, 2019}