Anthos is an open-source, fully managed cloud computing platform that helps you deploy workload on-prem as well as across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. With Google Anthos, enterprises can build new cloud-native applications faster, modernize their existing legacy apps, and securely deploy and manage them anywhere. You can manage these apps via a centralized cloud-based management panel with consistent policies.
In short, Google Anthos enhances your application development toolchain with its automated, scalable, and faster technologies. It embraces an approach of “write once, run anywhere.”
For this, Anthos uses GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) and Anthos Migrate to move workloads across cloud platforms without modifying the VMs or applications. Thus, your developers and admins don’t need to learn different APIs and environments.
Components of Google Anthos:
- Google Anthos is not a single product, rather an umbrella of microservices. This is what differentiates it from other cloud services.
- These services help you in legacy application modernization, cloud migration, hybrid, and multi-cloud management.
- It is a fully managed, open-source platform built upon GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) that manages and controls containers’ services for the GCP (Google Cloud Platform).
- Biggest advantage of using Google Anthos is that it prevents businesses from vendor lock-ins.
- Apart from it, Anthos removes complexity from multi-cloud and hybrid cloud management, thereby boosting enterprise innovation, operational efficiency, and cost savings. Not just that, it also promotes robust cybersecurity along with security compliance.
Top 5 Best Ways Enterprises Can Leverage Google Anthos:
1. Use GKE On-Prem to integrate cloud & on-prem infrastructure
Most of the time, corporations plan to shift their workloads to the cloud but are held back due to the hefty investments made in on-prem legacy applications and hardware. Due to their critical nature, it is not possible to rewrite mission-critical legacy apps, especially for public sector agencies.
Even if enterprises decide to forsake these investments, they still need to comply with standard regulations. This is another reason why it is challenging for corporations to migrate to cloud. Businesses situated in highly regulated industries are obliged to operate their workloads on-prem.
That’s when GKE On-Prem comes in!
Anthos comprises GKE On-Prem, which allows corporations to containerize their applications, deploy and run them anywhere to reap maximum benefits off cloud platforms. With a cloud-first mindset, you may keep your sensitive workloads unmodified on-prem, scale at your own pace and gradually switch your on-prem apps to feasible cloud solutions.
HSBC embraced the cloud-first approach and kept their critical workloads on-prem. Anthos helped HSBC in simplifying their highly complex data environment and managing multiple public clouds. With GKE On-Prem, HSBC was able to gradually modernize their legacy applications whenever necessary.
Anthos includes Anthos Config Management tool, which lets you automate policies and security elements at scale across all your deployments. Developers don’t need to learn different tools, as Anthos has only a single set of modern tools such as service mesh, containers, micro-services, etc.; these are enough to pump up your digital transformation journey. Furthermore, this approach prevents you from being locked with a single cloud vendor.
2. Modernize with Migrate for Anthos
Flexibility and portability are the key factors to succeed in your digital transformation objectives. One must be able to modernize applications in place for their On-Prem environment while also migrating to the cloud and containerizing the apps.
Migrate for Anthos provides a flexible and faster way to directly convert your VMs or physical services from GCE, Azure, or On-Prem or other sources to Anthos GKE containers.
After upgrading your On-Prem environments to GKE containers, you will witness reduced complexity in OS management, efficient use of resources, and ease of integration with Google Cloud for AI, ML, data analytics, etc.
DevFactory is one excellent use case for Migrate for Anthos. The company wants to offload its repetitive software development tasker to improve its dev teams’ productivity.
DevFactory witnesses less than 1% resource utilization in their data centers. With Migrate for Anthos, they were able to move their critical data center workloads to the cloud in just a couple of steps. Converting VMs and servers into containers enhanced their resource utilization rate dramatically, thereby reducing costs.
3. Accelerate App Modernization
Anthos is the first open app modernization platform to offer a centralized control plane and service delivery to enterprises, no matter what cloud environment it is- cloud, on-prem, or edge. This way, corporations were able to reap benefits from micro-services, containers, and cloud for their applications.
A German-based company Kaeser Kompressoren SE is a manufacturer of compressed air products and services. They wanted a robust platform to deploy and manage their existing On-Prem SAP workloads while also tapping into their other services operating across Google Cloud.
With Anthos, Kaeser experienced business innovation as they got better data insights by integrating advanced data analytics and machine learning in their apps. They were able to modernize their legacy on-prem applications without hindering the business operations, simultaneously running other applications on Anthos to monitor ML/AI and managed data analytics services
4. Accelerate your Hybrid Cloud Journey
Migrate for Anthos again helps you modernize your existing apps into containers.
One of the best use cases is of Atos, a Japan-based systems integrator that uses Migrate for Anthos to accelerate their hybrid cloud journey. Many corporations, including Atos, already have containers in their cloud infrastructure, allowing them to flexibly manage their complex systems. But, Atos also has several Virtual Machines in production, and they want to shift these to their hybrid cloud delivery models. Migrate for Anthos is one of the innovative tools to accelerate this migration process.
5. Unified management console for multiple clouds
Multi-cloud technology is rapidly evolving globally due to its tremendous benefits such as greater redundancy, use of more than one public cloud provider, no vendor lock-ins, and much more. But, multi-cloud environments can be quite complex to manage due to different cloud deployments featuring different tools and dashboards. This makes the managing of application deployments more difficult, time-consuming, and prone to errors.
Using Anthos, you can manage your multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments via a unified management console. Enterprises can move workloads between different public clouds without changing codes. Plus, they can also automate policies and security at scale across all their deployments.
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