What is Google Anthos and Why You Should Get Familiar with this Multi-Cloud Factory?

Last year, Google announced the launch of its Multi-Cloud management platform at the Cloud Next Conference. They named it Anthos. Google Anthos has since made remarkable progress in the Cloud automation and deployment landscape, which also has behemoths AWS and Azure leading the pack of innovations and services.

According to the latest survey on the state of container and Kubernetes deployments, Security remains a top concern in container strategies.

StackRox reported that nearly half of respondents having delayed moving an application into production because of security concerns.

Google called Anthos the most advanced ‘Networking Environment’, providing full functionality on Google Cloud and On-prem. The aim is to bring out Anthos– deliver a simplified Cloud deployment and security management platform for everyone on the deck. It’s like creating and managing your own Cloud!

At a very generic level, we can consider Google Anthos to be a cluster universe centralized within a Multi-Cloud framework that has several components to it. These are:

• Anthos GKE and Ingress
• Anthos Connect and Environ
• Anthos Config Management
• Anthos Service Mesh
• Cloud Run
• Binary Authorization
• Cloud Monitoring
• Kubernetes Applications

These components fit into various layers of Anthos Computing Network.

Google has ensured that Anthos is laced with the most advanced policy enforcement kits availed in the form of Anthos Congif Management, Enterprise Data Protection, and Controller. All these fit between Cloud Building ecosystem (GitHub, CircleCI, etc.) and Anthos Service Mesh.

In the last 12 months, a majority of the IT companies have experienced a security incident, mostly arising from human error or misconfiguration.

In February 2020, Kamal Shah, CEO of StackRox had said,  “We hear anecdotally from customers, that security has become a high priority as customers seek to deploy containers and Kubernetes applications in production. Organizations have executive buy-in – the challenge is understanding the security and compliance requirements so that they can be addressed early in the application development life cycle and prevent delays to application deployment.”

Google Anthos achieves exactly these for IT teams.

Anthos can be considered as an umbrella term for all the components, tools and applications, and hence, it’s our coolest Multi-Cloud Factory that provides not only a consistent development and operations experience for Cloud and on-premises environments, but also facilitates secure service-to-service communication with authentication and authorization based on service accounts.

With its centralized config management, Cloud deployment teams can leverage data to manage complex hybrid environments, without losing control. It works with core Kubernetes approaches like Namespace, labels, kubectl, and annotations, irrespective of where these Kubernetes clusters reside. Anthos Config Management is a very special tool in this whole scheme of Multi-Cloud factory, especially in cases where DevOps are collaborating with Open Source Communities to develop and use automated techniques for testing and rollouts.

The foundation of Anthos lies deep within Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). GKE enables the containerization of clusters, applications and workloads.

By simply integrating Clusters: Masters, Nodes, and more, Anthos makes Google Cloud Services seem agile. These run on Compute Engine VM instances, and that’s where Anthos is different from others in the league, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Node images supported over GKE are:

• Container-Optimized OS from Google
• Ubuntu
• Windows (beta)
• Container-Optimized OS with containerd (cos_containerd)
• Ubuntu with containerd (ubuntu_containerd)

As more and more enterprises move to Cloud to secure their businesses, Google Anthos on-prem and Google Clouds certainly packs a punch way above it weight. It’s competing directly with the traditional leaders in the industry. However, with new-age computing, security, and AutoML techniques at its disposal, and deeply entrenched in its workflow, Anthos could prove to be a real differentiator in the Cloud deployment business in 2020.

When everyone is looking for a Cloud environment that is centralized, regulated, secured, and Git Compliant, here’s a simple solution that can be spun around by developers in no time. On top of it code-free microservicing and cluster management with built-in protection make Anthos the real winner in the current scenario.

In our subsequent articles, we would continue to bring the unique nuances of Google Cloud Platform and its numerous applications and components.

With the rise in demand for customized Cloud Deployment and higher security, we can expect Google GKE investments to increase in the next 12-18 months.

Chris Kennedy, CISO and VP, Customer Success of AttackIQ said, “Adopting threat informed defense is the next evolution in program security strategies. By emulating real attacker behavior, AttackIQ’s automated platform can help organizations create and drive a continuous and informed feedback loop around the appropriateness and efficacy of their security investments.”

(To share your Cloud deployment methodology, please write to us at news@martechseries.com)