An Introduction to Google Cloud Anthos

Written by Priya George

Content Writer

Cloud computing is here to stay, with over 70% of companies utilizing cloud platforms. When devising an enterprise IT strategy, one must no longer convince companies to adopt cloud computing. Instead, the critical challenge now is to ensure the optimization and performance of cloud-native workloads. The cloud service providers market is highly saturated with similar services and products. Clients wish to select the product or solution that best meets their costs and performance targets; however, avoiding vendor lock-in is difficult. In recognition of this, Google Cloud Platform developed the product Anthos.

What is Google Anthos?

In short, Anthos is a platform that helps manage infrastructure and workloads across multiple platforms irrespective of whether they are on Google Cloud services, other cloud platforms, edge, or on-prem. By simplifying cloud migration technology, it is a truly unique service offered by Google Cloud Platform, as no other public cloud service provider has a counterpart. A report by Cloudability discovered that 84% of the companies have multi-cloud plans, where workloads are located across multiple private and public clouds like AWS, Azure, Upcloud, etc. With Anthos, application modernization, managing workloads, and policy enforcement can be carried out across multiple cloud and on-prem platforms.

Several tools within Anthos help aid in building an ‘open’ cloud management solution:

  • Migrate for Anthos: When modernizing applications, migrating workloads from VMs to containers is the primary obstacle. With the help of the Migrate for Anthos tool, application migration and modernization become a single step. Download our whitepaper to learn the steps to migrate an existing application successfully.
  • Anthos Config Management: Navigating workloads for a hybrid-cloud solution is complex. Developers must ensure configurations are applied across multiple clusters and avoid errors affecting both cloud environments. Anthos Config Management manages the deployment of Kubernetes objects across different clusters regardless of platform. Read our blog, where our expert provides an overview of the tool and steps on how to deploy multiple Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE) clusters across shared networks and install Anthos Config Management.
  • Anthos Service Mesh: Microservices architecture is highly recommended due to improved performance and scalability. However, managing the containers within which microservices are located can be tricky. Therefore, Google Cloud created Anthos Service Mesh powered by Istio to manage microservices more efficiently. Please read our blog to learn more about Anthos Service Mesh and its improvement upon Istio.
  • Anthos GKE: The key to making the multi-cloud strategy work is seamlessly managing the workloads across the platforms. There is a need for single-source visibility across these platforms, which Anthos GKE provides. Download our whitepaper, where we give a detailed account of deploying applications across multi-cloud platforms.
  • Cloud Run for Anthos: Cloud Run for Anthos offers a flexible serverless platform as a fully managed service supported by Knative. This service enables lightweight movement of Kubernetes clusters across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Furthermore, you can deploy these workloads to Anthos clusters with zero disruption.

In short, Google Cloud Anthos is the ideal service management platform for companies aiming to adopt a multi-cloud strategy for their company. From migrating workloads to configuration management, and multiple cluster management, Anthos has all the solutions.

Why Google Anthos should be part of your cloud portfolio

The reason to choose Anthos in a word is- openness. Businesses deserve to utilize the tools and services that best meet their needs without the obstacle of vendor lock-in. With Anthos, organizations can use compute capabilities from AWS/Azure and the AI/ML capabilities of Google Cloud services. There is a single pane of visibility which makes infrastructure management more accessible. In addition, tools like ‘Anthos for VMs’ and ‘Anthos on bare metal’ ensure that Anthos can work on virtual machines’ systems and not just on cloud platforms. With Anthos centralization abilities, organizations can set up their configurations once across multiple services and move Kubernetes clusters across environments quickly and easily. In addition, Anthos is compatible with multiple third parties in networking, big data, and security, such as Apache Spark, Citrix, Palo Alto, etc.

With Google Anthos, three critical challenges can be overcome:

  • Managing applications across environments-cloud and on-prem

  • Moving towards proactive cloud governance

  • Modernizing legacy applications

Google Anthos Pricing Model

When it comes to any commodity in the market, the bottom line is performance and cost. Regarding the Anthos pricing, the charge is applied to all managed Anthos clusters based on the number of cluster vCPUs. There are two models of pricing:

  • Pay-as-you-go: This pricing model is solely based on the number of resources you use. Your business will not be charged for idle resources. Google provides a comprehensive preview of the pay-as-you-go rates. Both hourly and monthly rates are provided.
  • Subscription: A set (at a discount) price for a fixed period with subscription pricing. However, there are no differential prices based on the deployment. However, the fee won’t be lowered due to the under usage of resources.

When choosing between the two, defining your strategy for using these resources is first necessary. Next, one needs to monitor the usage of resources and decide which model suits your needs. Google Cloud also believes in allowing businesses to sample their products so clients can try out Anthos for free for up to $800 worth of usage or a month. Refer to the Anthos pricing document to learn more about the rate offered. This flexibility in services and pricing makes Google Anthos a highly desirable product for managing modern-day cloud platforms.

How can we help?

With Anthos, organizations can move towards the future when developing and running modern apps. Our team can provide consulting services and develop custom end-to-end solutions with Google Cloud services platform. As partners of Google Cloud, we have certified experts who can leverage Anthos to meet your business goals. When it comes to leveraging Anthos, our team can offer you:

  • Hybrid/Multi-cloud solution architecture and implementation

  • Manage your microservices architecture

  • Migration to containers

  • Provide GCP managed services

With Royal Cyber, you can accelerate building modern cloud-native applications. To get more information, contact us at [email protected] or visit us at www.royalcyber.com.

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