What is Google Anthos and What Are the Benefits?
By Madi Cordle
For companies hoping to go through a digital transformation, legacy applications and software on outdated platforms are obstacles to overcome. Organizations need tools for application modernization, and Google Anthos is a tool for just that. Anthos, Google’s latest public cloud services offering, is an application management platform that launched in 2019. It is one of the first multi-cloud platforms from a mainstream public cloud provider with a theme of application modernization. Workloads can be deployed on-premise and across public clouds like Azure or AWS. Anthos provides a consistent experience for developers, operations, and security professionals, giving organizations the ability to innovate with confidence at a much faster rate. With Anthos, companies can modernize their existing apps (including legacy applications) build new ones, and securely run them anywhere. These apps are all maintained on-prem or in a multi-cloud environment from a cloud-based management plane.
The main difference between Google Anthos and its competitors is that Google’s technology is based in Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that works to automate computer app deployment. Google founded Kubernetes and has invested in technologies that perform in-place upgrades of VMs to containers in the hopes that enterprises switch to Kubernetes from VMs to run their applications. The command center of Anthos is Google Kubernetes Engine, or GKE, which is used to manage the distributed infrastructure running in Google’s cloud, and on premise data center or other cloud environments.
Another significant difference between Anthos and other app modernization tools is that Anthos is open-source, meaning that improvements can happen in any environment with no vendor log-in. The open-source Kubernetes are managed by Anthos, auto-updating the things that are run on top of it. Anthos is fully open, meaning that the user benefits from contributions made by other companies in addition to Google. These auto-updates and improvements allow faster software development for enterprise than ever before. Anthos for the cloud is often compared to what the Linux operating system did for servers 20 years ago. (Tan)
There are many benefits for organizations that decide to use Anthos, including development, migration, operations and security. It’s easy to adopt cloud-native development practices such as automated testing and deployment with Anthos. Apps can be migrated automatically to containers, which can be kept either on prem or in the cloud. Anthos can give your operations team new insights into a system’s performance. According to an independent study, companies using Anthos have reported a range of up to 75% faster application migrations, a range of up to 55% increase in operational efficiency, and a range of up to 75% improvement in efficiency in running security tasks. (Hölzle) Perhaps the biggest benefit of Anthos is that you can migrate workloads across clouds without having to change applications or VMs. You have the ability to run your apps on the cloud of your choice, keeping administrators from having to learn new environments. Anthos has changed the game because until recently, choosing a cloud meant locking yourself into one provider. Now businesses have the freedom to choose the best services, no matter where they are. Consider using Anthos to give your organization the advantage of unique cloud functionality.