Disparate networks, mass storage and the ever growing need for more computing power are some of the challenges many companies face. To manage traffic efficiently, they often keep several clouds on top of their own data centers, the complexity of which can be a source of many headaches. From this article you will learn how you can provide yourself with one centralized Kubernetes workload management system in various cloud and on-premise environments, i.e. what is Google Anthos?
Why one cloud solution is not enough?
The past few years have seen cloud adoption exceed almost any expectations. As many as 72% of IT decision makers say their companies choose cloud solutions for all upgrades and when acquiring new technical capabilities, according to a 2022 report by Foundry. Nearly as many decision makers (69%) admit that their organisations have accelerated the migration to the cloud.
Risks of migration
But for every success story, there is also one that highlights the perils of migration to the cloud. Sometimes companies move to the cloud while reengineering their services at the same time, which can be risky. Taking apart large, monolithic systems and reworking them into small, portable microservices that can be deployed in cloud environments poses a lot of challenges, including to data security.
Besides, as with any new technology, employees need time and training to familiarise themselves with the new environment. And that, again, means higher costs. Many companies choose to move to the cloud incrementally, to avoid interruptions to their services, caused, among others, by the need to retrain their employees.
Good prep
A way to mitigate that problem and ensure a smooth migration to the cloud, is to modernise all your systems before you move to the partner cloud. But that means that your solutions must work both in your on-premises data centres and in the cloud.
Unless you are a startup, your organisation most likely has quite a bit of legacy systems, processes and services that have developed over the years of operation. It is also very likely that you use a variety of partner solutions, and for one reason or another you may be unwilling to switch to a different provider. How do you migrate your services to the cloud without incurring giant switching costs?
Avoiding vendor-lock in
The way Microsoft managed to win market share from Lotus 123 with its Excel spreadsheet was not just by making it a superior product. In order to make sure companies were willing to switch to their product, they had to ensure that they could switch back and forth between Excel and Lotus, to read and write both formats easily. In other words, Microsoft managed to destroy the biggest barrier to entry to a new market by dismantling vendor-lock in.
The same principle governs Google’s Anthos. It operates with any service and allows companies to switch to different providers at any time without incurring any additional cost.
Imagine you run a chain of restaurants all over the world. Some of your restaurants might be more attuned to local tastes, some may be more optimised to cater to a specific market segment, some may be experimenting with entirely new recipes and some may be due for a major refurb. As a CEO, you want to be able to switch to and transplant solutions that prove successful, but all the while keeping costs down.
The same rules apply to cloud solutions. You want multi-cloud and you want full flexibility.
More than one cloud
As your company grows, cost optimization becomes a key element on the balance sheet. And it is crucial to be able to keep the costs low in the foreseeable future as well. Anthos allows you to move from one cloud to another, or even to your own data centre if that becomes more cost-effective at some point.
The fact that Anthos is a 100% software solution on open technology eliminates any vendor lock-in and allows companies to use the same set of tools and the same platform while moving to a public cloud. Anthos runs on any cloud, both Google, but also AWS or Microsoft Azure. Or any combination thereof.
It ensures that your employees have the same experience whether they work in the cloud or in the on-premises data centre. It allows for full monitoring of all work loads, ensuring both consistency and security across the organisation. Finally, it makes it very easy to find each component and to switch between seamlessly.
It’s as if you could sip your favourite cappuccino in Florence, while munching on a Parisian croissant and looking at the Tower Bridge at the same time.
What is Google Cloud Anthos?
Companies with several independent solutions from more than one cloud provider must manage infrastructure and security on each platform. It doesn’t matter which public cloud you use (or a multi-cloud solution of several). You could be using Google Cloud, or a Microsoft Azure, or Amazon’s AWS. Let’s assume that you are responsible for managing system components, cloud monitoring and service management in general. Of all the managed services Google and other public clouds, containers are one of the most convenient method of managing different environments, the Kubernetes engine being the go-to solution for most businesses.
Anthos is the Google Cloud container platform for running applications located anywhere and regardless of their scale. For organizations using native solutions such as containerization, container orchestration or service mesh, sooner or later there will come a moment when running a single cluster will prove to be insufficient.
However, using multiple clusters poses difficulties in ensuring the appropriate level of security and increases configuration and management costs. Although manual attempts to configure a single cluster are possible, they cannot avoid failures and detecting potential errors proves quite difficult.
To add spice, imagine that these clusters are not located in one place, but are distributed among different computing clouds, i.e. in any place. This is not an isolated case. There are organizations that, for various reasons, need to maintain the diversification of solutions – from their own data centers in production halls, through clouds supporting e.g. retail.
Building new container platforms in all these locations and then ensuring them with the appropriate level of monitoring, security, or continuous optimization significantly increases costs and extends the duration of the process. This is where Anthos comes in, providing organizations with a single, consistent platform that allows them to:
- Modernization of applications and infrastructure in one place,
- Creation of a unified operating model in the cloud,
- Scaling large, multi-cluster applications as a fleet,
- Launching and enforcing a consistent security and management system for applications.
Google Cloud Anthos — components
The Anthos platform is based on the concept of a fleet, i.e. a logical grouping of Kubernetes clusters that can be managed together. While the fact that the fleet can consist entirely of GKE clusters in Google Cloud is quite obvious, the ability to include non-Google Cloud clusters within the fleet makes this solution groundbreaking.
Google Cloud Anthos Components:
- Configuration and policy management tools – Make large-scale work easier by automatically adding and updating the same configuration, features, and security policies across your entire fleet, regardless of where your clusters are located.
- Fleet networking capabilities – Supports fleet-wide traffic management, includes Multi-Cluster Ingress for multi-cluster applications and Service Mesh traffic management capabilities.
- Identity Management Features – Helps you configure authentication consistently across your fleet and user workloads.
- Observability capabilities – Enhances your ability to monitor and troubleshoot your fleet clusters and applications. Thanks to them, you can verify the status of clusters and applications, resource utilization and the level of security.
- Anthos Service Mesh – If you have microservices-based solutions in your fleet, Anthos Service Mesh helps them run by providing tools for application security, networking, and network-wide observability.
How does the fleet work in Google Cloud Anthos?
The already mentioned Google Cloud Anthos fleets allow for the logical grouping and normalization of Kubernetes clusters, which facilitates infrastructure administration. The concept of identity is key – in the Anthos solution, if there are Kubernetes objects in the cluster fleet, specifically namespaces, with the same name, Anthos treats them as if they were the same. The key here is the identical name. Thanks to this standardization, managing multiple clusters simultaneously is greatly simplified. This means you can, for example, apply the same security policy to all fleet services, regardless of which clusters they are in or where those clusters themselves are located.
Another feature of the fleet is the assumption of identity of services – as in the case of namespaces, also services with the same name can be treated as the same service. Both services and workloads within a fleet can use a common identity for authentication and authorization.
How to run Google Cloud Anthos?
If you have access to Cloud Console, simply create a new Google Cloud project, select the appropriate payment model and enable Anthos API. Another option is to seek professional help from a partner Google Cloud – FOTC. This is especially important if you want to properly migrate to the Google cloud, but perhaps even more important for cost optimization purposes. You get not only technical support, but also training. Contact us now.
If you want to take full advantage of Anthos, use the Google Cloud CLI, which provides access to more advanced cluster registration features not available in the Google Cloud console. It is worth trying this option to better adapt the solution to the needs of the organization.
Contact us to let FOTC experts help you with migration, show you how to optimize Google Cloud services, increase resource utilization while optimizing costs.
