It allows you to manage a Kubernetes cluster from GCP that can have resurces mixed from both on-prem and google services (now you can also have pods on AWS).
For on-prem you'll need a WMWare hypervisor on your servers.
Why this is useful?
- Regulation: some workloads can be run only on-prem due to regulation (for instance, in Spain you can only process gambling data in the same region/comunidad autonoma you have the business).
- Cloud offloading of K8s workloads - you can workloads onprem off-peak and mixed loads cloud+onprem on peak times.
- Google Cloud Marketplace : you can deploy solutions from GCP Marketlplace on Anthos (that is, on your hardware, now also on other clouds).
- (now) Onprem + Multicloud workloads: Multicloud is hard. Not just having to know well how stuff works on each cloud, but also having to deal with rough interactions between clouds (even with k8s).
Disclaimer: I work for a Google cloud partner.
For me that's one of the biggest adoption barriers because unless you already have that VMware licences, you'll have to burn a lot of CapEX to run Anthos.
I hope they don't make us pay for both the bare metal license and the by-cpu license (or it is a _very_ small amount).
Insane.
My understanding is that Anthos is a multi cloud platform which essentially enables you to run managed Kubernetes on-prem, in GCP, and other public clouds. You can then run other Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Run, on your own hardware or in other clouds in addition to GCP
If the former, does the service itself depend on Google being up, or could Google go bankrupt and my on-prem hardware keep running Cloud Run?
Technologically both is possible.
Terrible blog post. Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out.
You can also join clusters with Istio just for admin and network traffic, i.e. one cluster with Istio in Azure and another cluster with Istio in AWS, talking via the mesh infrastructure. https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/gatew...
Unfortunately not even Googlers are immune to the draw to elite signalling by drowning your copy in industry jargon without ever getting to the point.
I see this a lot on hastily-composed GitHub Readmes and "rocket-launch" startup landing pages, but it's a shame it also happens to a company whose name is globally recognized.
I don't feel like that's why we all sometimes do this (though that might be an inside view and I might really be signalling along with everyone else.)
I feel like the internal thought-process that motivates this kinds of inside-baseball writing is twofold (depending on the stage of the project):
- early on: "the only people who could possibly care about something this new are people with the exact problem it solves, who stumbled onto it when jamming google full of enough keywords that there are zero other results; they already know what this does before reading; and they just want to confirm that it isn't fatally flawed. They're deploying this project in anger. (Of course they are; if they didn't desperately need it, they'd never rely on something so early in development!)"
- later on: "We're selling this to customers. We've picked a specific target market that has specific use-cases and needs, and we try to think about things the way they think about things 100% of the time, because talking to those people is what gets us money. We don't do any inbound marketing—we aren't trying to passively educate anyone outside our target market to get them interested. We're having enough trouble capturing the pre-qualified part of our funnel with in-person conversations. Converting people who haven't even fallen into the funnel yet? Who cares! They might get converted by accident if someone who already uses us takes the time to explain our product to them; but otherwise, the only time they'll hear about us is when we reach out to slowly warm them up for a million-dollar enterprise deal."
Being an developer myself however, yeah it's difficult to to get at the technical substance of what any of this means, as there is certainly lots of vaporware out there <cough>... <watson>... <cough>..
Haha! Good one. Google practically invented elite signaling.
- Anthos GKE: managed Kubernetes across GCP, AWS, on-prem via VMware vSphere
- Anthos service mesh: Istio + SRE practices (Cloud Operations)
- Cloud Run: Knative serverless
- Anthos Config Mgmt: policy & security automation
- Marketplace: 3rd party applications for Anthos
Disclaimer: work for Google, but nowhere near an expert on Anthos. Just going off of some notes I took last week.
However, I do want to note that having had the opportunity to sit in a number of customer meetings with very large enterprise customers and listen to our VP in conversations with their senior executive leadership, her article is intended to address concerns in a way that resonates with them. This article targets executive decision makers who need to commit enormous resources to long term strategies and it is important for them to hear in a language they understand that they will have enough flexibility to solve existing as well as evolving and shifting needs in the long run.
Many customers are trying to navigate their way to a successful modernization path that gives them the ability to run their workloads where they need to, helps them to apply modern best practices, and gives them unified management, monitoring, and compliance and auditing controls. Many of them are on prem and have VMware licenses right now, or have already begun implementing some kind of hybrid cloud strategy, or are even considering multi-cloud approaches.
For those of you looking for more practical information, we hear you. We were already preparing to launch new content directly targeted for developers to give you a direct, hands-on experience with Anthos using live clusters and a running application as part of Next.
Unfortunately due to changing conditions, we had to take a phased approach to communicating this as part of moving everything to completely digital formats. However, the good news is that you will be able to explore Anthos on Google Cloud for yourself and I'm really looking forward to sharing those details very soon.