Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google Cloud's new multi- and hybrid-cloud offering called Anthos at the Google Cloud Next 2019 conference, in San Francisco.
This Google product has big implications for the industry, as it allows customers to manage workloads running in the Google Cloud, in their data centre, or even in the clouds of rival providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Anthos is based on the Google Cloud Services Platform that the company announced last year. It embraces open standards, letting users run applications, unmodified, on existing on-premises hardware investments or in the public cloud.
"The Cloud Services Platform gave businesses a secure managed solution and it gave developers a common development platform. It was a huge step forward, but it still left one major customer problem unsolved: it didn't make it easy for you all to span multiple cloud providers," Pichai explained.
"So we have been hard at work and have spent the last year developing a product that gives you the flexibility to make the best decisions for your business now and in the future.
"Anthos is based on Kubernetes and runs on-premises but also supports multi- and hybrid-clouds and is fully managed by Google. It brings together the simplicity of open source platforms, our deep technical expertise and the freedom to choose the right cloud partner for your job," Pichai said.
Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling and management, and was originally designed by Google.
Anthos is notable as it's unusual for the big cloud providers to launch a product that would effectively allow users to run applications on competing cloud platforms. Google said the product came in reaction to customer demand, and enterprises will have a single dashboard to manage their applications and will get a single bill.
The announcement is likely an attempt for Google Cloud to differentiate itself from the dominant cloud computing market leaders AWS and Microsoft Azure.
"Anthos will also let you manage workloads running on third-party clouds like AWS and Azure, giving you the freedom to deploy, run and manage your applications on the cloud of your choice, without requiring administrators and developers to learn different environments and APIs," Google said.
"And because it's software-based, there is no costly hardware to buy and install."
Along with the launch of Anthos, Google Cloud announced an expanded ecosystem of over 30 hardware, software and systems integration partners. These include heavy hitters like Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE, VMware, Intel, Dell, Lenovo and Deloitte.
Google said it is also working closely with enterprise software providers to integrate their offerings with Anthos's unique capabilities. To date, more than 20 independent software vendors have already committed to integrating their software with Anthos.
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