Global enterprises in a number of industries across the globe are witnessing gains from using Google’s application management platform Anthos to run and manage their multi-cloud applications.
This was the word from Jonathan Frankel, customer engineer at Google Cloud, speaking this week at the ITWeb Cloud, Data Centre & DevOps Summit, at The Forum, in Bryanston.
Launched in 2019, Anthos is an open hybrid and multi-cloud application platform that enables users to modernise existing applications, build new ones, and run them anywhere in a secure manner.
The software-based solution comprises an integrated set of services developed to ensure the entire organisation, operators, developers and security teams can accomplish their duties without a siloed approach. These services include container management, application development, policy management and operation management.
“The three main issues often encountered by businesses in their cloud migration journey include the complexities in their proprietary IT stack, dependencies on their legacy applications, and slow speed of migration,” noted Frankel.
“Enterprises now want to modernise, so they can increase efficiency, without business disruption. They also want future apps to be built to be cloud-native, leveraging managed services and designed to be multi-cloud in nature. Built on open source technologies pioneered by Google, including Kubernetes, Istio and Knative, Anthos enables consistency between on-premises and cloud environments, and helps to accelerate application development.”
Global enterprise customers in a number of industries already using Anthos include banking and financial services firm HSBC, and industrial manufacturer Siemens, according to Frankel.
Microsoft was the first hyper-scale cloud platform operator to introduce a platform that makes it possible to run a cloud environment in customers’ own data centres through Azure Stack. Amazon and Google later followed suit with solutions to achieve the same functions.
Another concern from companies, continued Frankel, is being locked into one proprietary system, which restricts business potential and increases risk.
Anthos has a viable solution for this, he noted, allowing organisations to manage workloads running on third-party clouds like Amazon Web Services and Azure, giving organisations the freedom to deploy, run and manage their applications on the cloud of their choice, without requiring administrators and developers to learn different environments and APIs.
“In a recent study, 94% of surveyed CIOs indicated at least two out of the top three business priorities depend on them,” Frankel said.
“They acknowledge that migrating to the cloud, adopting new application architectures and building cloud-native services will help them jump-start growth and accelerate time to market. However, 80% of them report that, despite having migrated a portion of their applications, they have struggled to achieve the desired level of agility and business benefits.”
Anthos allows enterprises to take their existing VM-based workloads, convert them into containers and run them in Anthos GKE, the Kubernetes service that forms part of the platform.
Google says it is working closely with its ecosystem of partners to support customers across the globe, launching with more than 30 hardware, software and system integration partners, including Cisco, VMware, Dell EMC, HPE, Intel and Lenovo, which have committed to delivering Anthos on their own hyper-converged infrastructure for their customers.
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