Google Cloud Anthos Series - 1: Introduction to Anthos
Nowadays, Google Cloud Anthos is one of the most buzzing words while talking about Hybrid/Multi-cloud with Google Cloud but there is no straight way to master this very important skill set.
So here we’re going to learn about this amazing tool from very zero knowledge of Anthos using a series of blogs, where you’ll learn about Anthos’s capability with demo implementation of each feature & their use cases and we’re very excited to see how you’re going to leverage this technology to solve for better tomorrow.
So let’s start with the introduction blog, where we will learn -
- Challenges with Hybrid/Multi-cloud adoption
- What is Anthos?
- Architectural Overview of Anthos
- Features/Functionalities of Anthos with Use cases.
- Real-world examples
let’s start the learning….
Challenges with Hybrid/Multi-cloud adoption
According to the survey by IDG, Almost 3/4 or more of organizations already use the cloud in one way or another. But believe it or not, the total migrations to the cloud are only ~10% of total workloads. That leaves 90% of existing workloads still on-premise, or in a local data center with some basic service integration in the cloud.
Organizations made big investments in their data centers and their on-prem infrastructure, and moving the entire infrastructure to the cloud whilst adopting the cloud is a financial concern. They don’t want to just turn away their previous investments. A solution to that is a hybrid cloud(On-Prem + Cloud) where they are able to continue to leverage what they have and move gradually to the cloud.
Additionally, no organizations want to tie themselves to a single cloud provider because every cloud has its own specialization in a specific area like Google’s Big data & Machine Learning solutions are remarkable, same as Azure, their security services are exceptional. This is the reason organizations want to be able to function their infrastructure in multi-cloud(Multiple Cloud Vendors).
With the above advantages & concerns, a lot of customers try modernizing their applications and encapsulating services into microservices. However, reengineering and migration can be tedious and It is not surprising that some organizations may struggle/fail and that is where, Anthos comes into the picture.
What is Anthos?
Referring to the above problems, if you could somehow modernize, where you are in place, on-prem or in your data center, before you move to the cloud so that when you wanted to move to the cloud, things were already ready, you have done the modernization work locally.
But to accomplish something like that, you would require a platform that works in a hybrid manner, that is in the cloud as well as in the data center adhering to the benefits of an open source ecosystem, like Kubernetes, Istio, etc. also platform itself needs to be consistent across those different environments. You don’t want to have a separate set of tools to manage your cloud environments versus your on-prem or data center environment. You want those things to be consistent because you want to manage that entire estate of infrastructure that you have with a consistent set of tools and policies. You want your people to be able to interact with a single platform So imagine a world where you can seamlessly move workloads between public clouds and on-premise infrastructure and that solution is called Anthos.
At a higher level -
“Anthos is an application deployment and management platform/Tool for hybrid and multi-cloud setups.”
some of the important points related to Anthos, which laid it stand out -
- It is a 100% software solution.
- Infrastructure is abstracted away because there is no hardware lock-in
- Anthos is built on a set of open technologies, so you can avoid vendor lock-in.
so now, we know, what is Anthos & the problem, it is solving so let’s see the components of Anthos, which help solve modernization issues.
Architectural Overview of Anthos
To understand the architecture of Anthos, let’s take the problem for which Anthos comes into the picture, which is basically multi-cloud modernization. So As an enterprise, it is very common to have existing networking, storage, and compute resources on multiple clouds and in your own data centers with standard layers of configuration, which helps you manage this heterogeneous architecture.
Those layers are -
- Infrastructure Management Layer — This layer helps you manage your physical hardware configurations, on top of which, your whole application stack is going to run.
- Cluster Management Layer — Nowadays, most organizations are following the microservice architecture & they’re using container technology to achieve this, so in this layer, you can manage your containers with the help of some of the most popular orchestrating tools like Kubernetes.
- Service Management Layer — As the application stack is diversified, services(APIs) need to talk with each other & this layer helps, you manage, how the application services will work.
- Policy Enforcement Layer — Security is one of the main concerns in these kinds of architecture because you’re going to deal with different environments & services so it is very important that we’ve some kind of policy & rules which should be applied to the application stack & this layer helps to achieve this.
- Application Deployment Layer — This layer basically helps you, deploy your application in all the environments using some CI/CD or other ways based on platform preference.
- Application Development Layer — In this layer developers develop their applications, it could be any cloud platform IDEs, local application development environments, etc.
- Observability & Management Recommendation Component — This is one of the most important parts of any multi-cloud/hybrid architecture from admins, SREs, DevOps & business prospects. This layer helps you observe the whole stack, which helps you make business decisions using some kind of machine learning model, defining SLOs, and helps SREs on enhancement of the environment & better visibility while addressing/troubleshooting any issues.
There are lots of things, right?
Now, consider repeating this set of tasks/layers and data across a hybrid and multi-cloud landscape. It becomes very, very complex, Your platform admins, SREs, and DevOps who are responsible for security and efficiency have manual cluster setup, data collection, and information synthesis. With this complexity, it’s hard to stay current, understand business implications, and ensure compliance, not to mention the difficulty of onboarding a new hire.
Anthos helps solve these challenges. With Anthos, you get a consistent way to manage with similar infrastructure management, container management, service management, and policy enforcement across your platforms with the help of different features in each layer mentioned in the below architecture of Anthos.
As a result, you gain observability across your platforms in one single place, including business information, alerts, and operational information. With this information, you might decide to optimize, automate, and set policies or SLOs, or might rely on Google’s machine-learning models to make automated suggestions. You take those recommendations or make your own decisions and apply them to different management layers. Sounds interesting right?, let’s deep dig out into different features on Anthos.
Features/components of Anthos
In this section, we’ll see the different features of Anthos, which helps you in different steps of multi-cloud modernization.
- Anthos Clusters
In your infrastructure, If you ever used open source Kubernetes for cluster Management then you know how difficult/time-consuming task is over there, while bringing up a cluster & management of updates so in Google, we’ve hosted a version of Kubernetes called GKE, where within a min, we’ve running cluster with us, their updates scaling all are handled by Google itself & we can leverage the same GKE flexibility in your on-prem/other cloud platforms as Anthos Clusters with a unified way to work on & centralized dashboard for easy management.
Benefits/Use Case
- Easy provisioning & management of clusters & their management
2. Multi-Cluster Ingress
It is a cloud-hosted controller for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters/Anthos Clusters. It’s a Google-hosted service that supports deploying shared load-balancing resources across clusters and across regions as we’re dealing with a multi-cloud environment.
Benefits/Use Cases
- No need to manage underlying hardware for creating resources.
- A software-based solution so easy can couple with different environments.
3. Anthos Service Mesh (Managed Istio)
It is a suite of features and tools that help you observe(Monitor) and manage secure, reliable services(Service Mesh) in a unified way on-premises or on Google Cloud.
Benefits/Use Case
- Traffic Management — It can control the flow of traffic between services, into the mesh (ingress), and to outside services (egress).
- Observability insights — Service metrics and logs for HTTP traffic within the mesh, pre-configured service dashboards, Service-to-service relationships, communication security posture & SLOs.
- Security benefits — Mitigates risk of replay or impersonation attacks that use stolen credentials, Ensures encryption in transit, in between pods & access from authorized clients only by mTLS certificates.
4. Logging and Monitoring
This is Google Cloud’s operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) which is a built-in observability solution for Google Cloud & best tool for monitoring insights, logging for troubleshooting, and alerting on resources/incidents.
Benefits/Use Case
- fully managed logging solution
- metrics collection
- monitoring,
- dashboarding
- alerting
5. Anthos Config Management
ACM is Google’s modern application platform which helps you to manage different clusters by deploying shared environment configurations and enforces approved security policies across Kubernetes clusters on-premises, on GKE, and across multiple data centers and clouds.
Benefits/Use Cases
- Simplify deployment of configuration & Policies
- Consistent configurations and policy management
- Scalable across environments
6. Migrate to Containers(formally Migrate for Anthos)
This tool makes it fast and easy to modernize traditional applications away from virtual machines and into native containers. Using Migrate for Anthos and GKE to convert VM-based workloads into containers that run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or Anthos clusters. Workloads from VMs that run on VMware, AWS, Azure, or Compute Engine can be migrated to Google Cloud in container format with ease.
Benefits/Use Case
- It gives the flexibility to containerize your existing workloads(VM based) with ease
- reducing infrastructure costs
- Helps modernize application life-cycle and operations management including integrating with CI/CD pipeline using Cloud Build.
7. Cloud Run for Anthos(Managed Knative)
This component gives you the flexibility in leveraging the serverless offering from Google Cloud which is basically a fully managed version of a native called Cloud Run. you don’t need to provision any cluster or resource with the support of custom domain enablement & very cheaper sometimes zero cost if the application is not accessed by anyone.
Benefits/Use Cases
- Stateless Containers with HTTPS requests
- Built-in domain handling
- To save the costs, save to zero or as much as you want(*T&C)
8. Binary Authorization
It provides centralized software supply-chain security for applications that run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Anthos clusters
Benefits/Use Cases
- Implementing zero-trust security policies
- Trusted container images deployment
- Authorized access control enforcement
9. Cloud Marketplace Integration
Cloud Marketplace helps you quickly deploy functional software packages like Prometheus, LAMP stack, etc that run on Google Cloud & you can use this ready-to-go tool with an integration of Anthos for easy deployment of software packages.
Benefits/Use Cases
- Ready to use software package stack.
- No need to configure or provision resources.
Lastly, Anthos simplifies and provides a consistent view across your company’s landscape so you can improve security, use resources more efficiently, innovate faster, and demonstrate measurable success.
Real-world examples
Now, you know almost everything related to Anthos so let’s how companies are leveraging this amazing technology to solve business use cases & maybe you find something relevant to solve your use case.
- Major League Baseball — https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/mlb-runs-anthos-for-bare-metal-in-its-ballparks
- PLAID Multicloud with Anthos — https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/plaid-goes-multicloud-with-gke-and-anthos-clusters-on-aws
- HSBC use case of reducing analytics complexity with Anthos — https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/plaid-goes-multicloud-with-gke-and-anthos-clusters-on-aws
for more, please follow the link
Let’s stop here for now, but this series includes all the features explanation with a sample demo so stay tuned & we’re very happy to see what use case you’re going to build for a better tomorrow & we’re part of this amazing journey.
Thank you for reading……(Our next blog is on Setting up Multi-Cloud between AWS & Google Cloud )
Special Thanks to Priyanka Vergadia & Ankur Kotwal for all the sharings, Resources followed for this blog - Link
If you have any queries regarding the article, I’m very happy to read them in the comment section or you can reach out to me via LinkedIn
