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Google Anthos features and updates

Review the latest improvements to Google's hybrid cloud platform, such as bolstered multi-cloud and on-premises support. Here are the Anthos updates you won't want to miss.

Kurt Marko
By
Published: 29 Apr 2021

Google launched Anthos in 2019 and, since then, it has added features and updates to compete in the highly competitive market for multi-cloud services.

Anthos is a cloud-agnostic container environment based on Kubernetes and its software ecosystem. Since managed Kubernetes is a commodity product, much of Anthos focuses on the peripheral pieces necessary to create an enterprise runtime environment, including:

  • service management and traffic routing with Istio;
  • configuration and policy management;
  • monitoring and logging; and
  • serverless application development.

In the two years since Anthos' introduction, Google improved many of the core features, added capabilities and expanded the list of supported cloud and hardware environments. Here's an overview of some of the most significant Anthos updates since the service launched.

Multi-cloud support

Notably for public cloud users, Google made Anthos multi-cloud support for AWS generally available. AWS cloud users can run and manage applications with Anthos Config Management. Google also announced preview support for Anthos on Microsoft Azure.

IT teams can use Anthos Config Management to consolidate container administration under one service. This improves operational efficiency and reliability via programmatic, declarative policies that automate cluster deployment and minimize manual configuration errors.

Anthos Config Management now supports the following six environments:

  1. Google Cloud containers on Google Kubernetes Engine and VMs;
  2. on-premises VMware vSphere clusters;
  3. on-premises bare metal servers;
  4. AWS containers;
  5. Azure containers; and
  6. Anthos attached clusters.

The attached clusters extend Anthos features such as Config Management and Service Mesh to non-native Kubernetes environments. Attached clusters include existing on-premises clusters, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine or OpenShift Container Platform Kubernetes clusters.

Additional Anthos features and updates

Beyond support for other clouds, there are other Anthos updates to note.

Google expanded Migrate for Anthos support for Amazon cloud services including Amazon S3 data sources, projects, Amazon VPCs, AWS Identity and Access Management controls and Amazon Elastic Container Registry. Migrate for Anthos can also now handle HTTPS proxies to access external image repos and services.

Anthos also added support for event triggers in Google Cloud Run. This includes events from more than 60 Google services including Cloud Storage, Cloud Scheduler, Pub/Sub and Audit logs.

Google launched an Anthos Developer Sandbox that packages the tools required to code, debug and test applications on an Anthos environment. The Anthos Developer Sandbox consists of the Cloud Shell Editor and browser-based Eclipse IDE, Cloud Code IDE add-ons for containerized applications and Cloud Build Local runtime environment.

Google also expanded its program for hardware partners that can build configurations verified on Anthos. The Anthos Ready Partner Initiative now includes Atos, Dell Technologies, Equinix Metal, HPE, Intel, NetApp, Nutanix, Nvidia, Pure Storage and Robin.io.

Other features and improvements to the Anthos platform include:

  • on-premises support for the Speech-to-Text service to maintain local control over speech data;
  • an Anthos Identity Service that supports OpenID Connect;
  • Anthos Security Blueprints, which encapsulate Google's best practices for auditing, monitoring, locality and policy enforcement;
  • support for GreenLake, HPE's managed, usage-based private cloud infrastructure; and
  • support for Terraform to automate the setup of Anthos Service Mesh clusters.

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