Google Moves Toward the Hybrid Cloud
When you think of the hybrid cloud, Google is certainly not the first cloud provider to come to mind. If you’re in a Windows-centric infrastructure then Azure with its tight integration to Microsoft’s server products is most likely your first choice of hybrid cloud providers or if you have a substantial VMware investment then you might think of Amazon and their VMware Cloud on AWS offering. Google has largely been considered more of a consumer-oriented public cloud entity – focusing more on Gmail and Google Apps than enterprise applications. Google is definitely looking to change that with its latest move into the hybrid cloud space. Considering that Gartner has estimated that 72% of companies have currently adopted a hybrid cloud strategy it certainly makes sense that Google would want a bigger piece of the hybrid cloud market.
Google Anthos Provides Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Management
This past April 2019 at their Cloud Next conference, Google announced Anthos, their new hybrid and multi-cloud platform. Formerly, Google Cloud Services Platform, Anthos is mainly targeted toward open source customers that want to take advantage of the cloud’s scalability and geographic scope but don’t want to get locked in to a specific cloud vendor. To achieve that end, Anthos enables you to run your applications on existing on-premise infrastructure or in the public cloud. Google’s Anthos will run on Google Cloud Platform as well as other third-party clouds including AWS and Azure. Anthos is a single managed service that will let you manage and deploy workloads on the cloud of your choice, without requiring administrators and developers to learn different environments and APIs for each different cloud provider. Anthos is a 100% software-based solution that’s based on the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google’s managed Kubernetes service. This allows it to be automatically updated with feature updates and security patches.
As a part of the Anthos announcement Urs Hölzle Google’s senior VP for its technical infrastructure stated. “I can’t really stress how big a change that is in the industry, because this is really the stack for the next 20 years, meaning that it’s not really about the three different clouds that are all randomly different in small ways. This is the way that makes these three clouds — and actually on-premise environments, too — look the same.”
Anthos Migrate Moves VMs to the Cloud
In conjunction with the Athos release, Google also announced a beta version of Anthos Migrate. As its name suggests, Anthos Migrate migrates on-premises VMs as well as VMs from Google and other clouds directly into containers running in GKE. The migration is designed to be an automatic process.
A Hybrid Cloud Multi-Cloud Future
Anthos is definitely about modernization. While it may take Google some time to gain enterprise traction I think this move clearly shows that seamless hybrid cloud and multi-cloud connectivity is the wave of the future. Anthos is a subscription-based service. The list prices start at $10,000 per month per 100 vCPU block. Businesses can negotiate for lower individual pricing. Google has already extended its support for Anthos to a number of enterprise partners including VMware, Dell EMC, HPE, Intel, and Lenovo. You can learn more about Google’s new hybrid and multi-cloud solutions at Anthos.