Anthos

Google Cloud Anthos is a hybrid, cloud-agnostic container environment. Google Cloud Anthos is a software product that enables enterprises to use container clusters instead of cloud virtual machines (VMs) to bridge gaps between legacy software and cloud hardware.

So what exactly is Anthos?

Anthos is to Kubernetes what Kubernetes is to containers. And more. When you create a Deployment in Kubernetes, K8S makes sure your Pods always match the desired state. A pod crashes? Kubernetes will schedule a new one, to get from the actual state into the desired state. Kubernetes does that in a declarative way, as an end user you probably let Kubernetes know what you’d like by using YAML files.

Just the same, Anthos is a platform that will manage your Kubernetes clusters for you. It does 3 things, and it does them well:

• Infrastructure provisioning in both cloud and on-premises.
• Infrastructure management tooling, security, policies and compliance solutions.
• Streamlined application development, service discovery and telemetry, service management, and workload migration from on-premises to cloud.

You tell Anthos how you want your Kubernetes clusters to look like, and it will make sure your demands are met. The great thing here is that those different clusters are not limited to GKE clusters. With the Anthos GKE Connect Agent installed on your Kubernetes cluster, that cluster can reside anywhere, as long as it can connect to Anthos.

Tip

To create Anthos, Google partnered with hardware providers, such as Cisco, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NetApp and Robin.io to deliver the Anthos systems prepackaged in the software. However, Google Cloud Anthos can only run on servers capable of hosting Kubernetes clusters with the Google Kubernetes Engine.