In most of the scenarios, what prevents IT entrepreneurs from embracing cloud is their anxiety about getting locked into the wrong provider. This leads many of the businesses to invest heavily in on-premise platforms. When Google enquired their customers, many of them expressed their wish to take advantage of the cloud’s scalability, innovative offerings, geographical reach and above all, its ability to write once and run anywhere. In its biggest Cloud conference of the year named Google Cloud Next ’19, Google has announced a solution to ease their customers’ woes.

Anthos for a multi-cloud world

On the very first day of Google Cloud Next ’19, the tech giant introduced Anthos, Google Cloud’s new open platform that lets you run an app anywhere. Anthos (formerly Cloud Services Platform) allows you to build and manage modern hybrid applications across environments. Built on open standards, Anthos enables you to run your applications (without any modifications) on your existing on-premise hardware investments or in the public cloud. It is possible to manage workloads running on third-party clouds such as AWS or Azure, meaning that you have the freedom to deploy, run and manage your applications on the cloud of your choice. Your developers or administrators do not require to learn different environments and APIs.

A hundred per cent software-based solution, Anthos requires no forced stack refresh as it can get up and running on your existing hardware quickly. Anthos is based on Google Kubernetes Engine (Google’s managed Kubernetes service), so you have access to latest feature updates and security patches. Anthos’ hybrid functionality will be generally available both on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as well as in the users’ data centers with GKE On-Prem.

More Security

While open APIs offer the freedom to modernize your application at any place, time and speed, there is no compromise on security. Anthos offers a streamlined multi-cloud management by helping you automate policy and security at scale across your deployments. Anthos Config Management allows you to define and manage your configuration centrally, at a higher level of the stack and leaves the system to deal with the rest. When you gain greater awareness, consistency and control over your application, it saves your time considerably.

Anthos’ open source ecosystem is widely supported by strong industry partners like Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE, VMware, and many others. Its fully-managed open source approach (even in on-premise environments) makes Anthos a safe choice for your enterprise cloud strategy. Enterprises can enjoy the benefits of open source without the need of operating it.

What next

Along with Anthos, Google has announced a beta version of Anthos Migrate, a unique migration technology that auto-migrates VMs from on-premises or other clouds, directly into containers in GKE with less effort. Anthos Migrate aims to free enterprise IT teams from managing infrastructure tasks like VM maintenance and OS patching and move their focus to managing and developing applications.

In its latest blog post, Google has mentioned the success stories of early Anthos customers like HSBC and Siemens. While the former claims that the new software-based approach for managing hybrid environments provided them a unique solution to reduce the complexity and costs of big data analytics, the latter is excited about having a consistent platform to run their workloads across environments.

How far Anthos can enable businesses to reduce the complexity of their IT and help them move faster? We’ll see in the coming months.