Create a Compute Framework Anywhere Using Anthos

The complexities of today’s IT environments aren’t a secret to anyone in the software industry. As enterprises migrate to the cloud, update existing IT infrastructure and adopt new platforms, ensuring the optimal use of compute resources ranks somewhere between challenging and daunting. The result, if an organization stumbles, is subpar performance, higher operational costs and inadequate security protections.

Google’s Anthos takes direct aim at the problem. The open source platform aids teams in designing, building and managing hybrid applications on-premises or in the public cloud. The technology — built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Istio and Knative —works across various cloud platforms. It offers cloud tools for migrating, modernizing and automating applications to create a more efficient and consistent cloud experience.

Don’t think of Anthos as a product; it’s actually a robust framework designed to support multiple vendors, platforms, systems and other technologies — including containers and code libraries. It provides a better way to manage highly distributed compute capabilities across vast networks. Anthos brings the entire package of tools together that are required for modern cloud native delivery by capturing logging metrics, telemetry data and system management capabilities. All of this can help your enterprise achieve a compute anywhere framework.

Anthos represents a better way 

One thing that makes Anthos so appealing is that it helps organizations avoid headaches that can result from heterogenous applications and systems. But it also includes a fully managed Kubernetes — including a single point of control for monitoring, logging and securing systems. This is particularly valuable in hybrid cloud environments. The approach can help your organization tackle application modernization while delivering a framework for consistent development and deployment. Along the way, Anthos also enables better security policy for administration and automation.

Anthos simplifies things by abstracting configuration information. Essentially, you construct the configuration away from the point of implementation — so that when a system starts up, it pulls the information it needs from another location. It also puts everything into software code. This makes it possible to reconstruct configurations and other components using the same tool set in entirely different systems. One way to think of Anthos is it serves as a blueprint for network control. It elevates the network layer out of the software using a cloud director or traffic director.

Ultimately, the ability to redirect HTTP and other network traffic at Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Level 7 — the application layer — is a powerful capability. It impacts apps, users and processes, along with quality of service, in a profound way. The appeal is particularly strong for enterprises with extensive IT resources. It ultimately delivers a more fluid compute framework.

Putting Anthos to work 

If you’re looking to implement Anthos or roll it out across your enterprise, it’s typically a wise decision to start small, learn and scale up. Although there’s no significant learning curve associated with the platform, the process of connecting it to existing networks and cloud platforms requires some experimentation, learning and tweaking. If you have greenfield cloud projects — especially those that require elastic scaling — you may want to try Anthos as a pilot. hen, you can scale it up to other systems and parts of an enterprise network.

In most cases, it’s possible to be up-and-running with Anthos immediately. It includes a migration tool, metrics monitoring and logging — as well as the ability to manage Google, AWS and other resources through proxies with its Stackdriver tool. What’s more, these proxies don’t have to be in containers — they can reside on virtual machines or on bare metal. What distinguishes Anthos is that as applications boot, they reach out to the traffic director and authenticate automatically. They’re then ready to accept traffic.

As your organization moves to cloud and microservices-based IT frameworks — and looks to tackle multi-cloud transformation — Anthos represents a dollars and sense solution to IT and business. It’s efficient, simplifies things, and trims costs. This develop-once-and-deploy-anywhere approach ushers in a level of interoperability that seemed beyond reach only a few short years ago. It represents the future of IT.

If you’re looking to learn more about how Anthos can help your enterprise, contact our team.