All About Anthos

Cloud technology can seem overwhelming on its own. In addition to finding the best way to manage it, it can be hard to know when and how to begin migrating—not to mention understanding how to maximize and optimize all Google Cloud has to offer once you’re there. Plus, handling various cloud services alongside other on-prem or legacy environments can become frustrating and even quite expensive.

That’s where Anthos comes in.

This Google Cloud application management platform provides your business with a single, consistent set of tools and workflows to control and manage all of your environments and workloads.

ANTHOS IN A NUTSHELL

Anthos is an ecosystem that allows you to accelerate your journey to full control over your infrastructure by treating all objects in your infrastructure as Kubernetes—which is manageable using the GitOps workflow.

GitOps workflows work in any environment—GCP, AWS, or even on-premises—meaning you can change your configurations with simple pull requests. These changes align your systems and make them compatible with each other.

As a result, you can manage your entire infrastructure from one place at the same time.

5 MAIN ANTHOS FEATURES

The Anthos ecosystem gives you the tools to manage all your environments from one space through five main features.

 

1. ANTHOS SERVICE MESH

With Anthos, you can use Google's toolset or any other open-source tools. Anthos Service Mesh provides a networking layer where users can manage and configure all communication between their environments and services.

Even though Google provides this ready-to-use, tested, and approved tool for either on-prem or Google Cloud, you’re not limited to just these elements. You can use any ones you want, so long as they are open-source.

 

2. LOGGING AND MONITORING

A great example of how Anthos delivers ease and seamlessness to your business is with its Logging and Monitoring feature.

After you’ve set up and configured your environments, it’s smart to create a dashboard to monitor your clusters’ health. Google offers Stackdriver so users can keep track of your environments and receive performance and diagnostics data about the state of your infrastructure.

You’re not locked into using Stackdriver and can just as easily opt to use Grafana, Prometheus, EFK, or any other open-source monitoring and logging system.
 

3. ANTHOS ADMIN CLUSTERS

Anthos does more than just align and configure your infrastructure the way you need it—it also lets you create and deploy new Kubernetes clusters at any given time.

Using admin clusters, Anthos allows you to configure new environments with minimal input from the cloud provider. Admin clusters are then integrated into your cloud environment and become the control center of all cloud provisioning operations.

This control center allows you to create new clusters on any platform—AWS, GCP, or on-premises—with a simple userCluster custom Kubernetes object. Ultimately this means you can avoid the hassle of dealing directly with each cloud provider's API as well as enduring the tedious synchronizing process all over again.

In the end, admin clusters let you direct and manage all of your user clusters and workloads with a painless process for developing and expanding your multi-cloud infrastructure.

 

4. LOAD BALANCING

Anthos excels at load balancing since having a multi-regional, multi-cluster, and multi-cloud environment may sound like a nightmare. It even makes load balancing look somewhat appealing with components such as Ingress for Anthos that make it easy to run globally distributed applications.

With the addition of two more object types—MultiClusterService and MultiClusterIngress—Anthos lets you balance traffic between your multi-clustered applications benefiting AnyCast routing.

 

5. ANTHOS CONFIG MANAGER

All platforms must take security seriously, and Anthos is no different. All standard sets of components—such as pod security and network policies—are ready to go immediately. Plus, you can use Anthos Config Manager to manage them in a centralized and unified manner across the entire platform.

You can also create custom policies, apply them to all cloud platforms and on-premises environments, and use Workload Identity and BinAuth features. Each of these elements keeps your applications safe and compliant with international security requirements.

READY, SET, NOW WHAT?

If you’ve implemented everything up to this point, then you’ve seen your environments synchronized, your logging and monitoring are underway, and your workloads are getting where they need to be. So, what’s next?

Now it’s time to figure out how all of this will impact your business and its future.

First, you get one ecosystem that controls every workload in your multi-cloud environment. Without the need to monitor and control each of your platforms individually, you’ll see a significant decrease in your company’s expenses with an increase in your operational effectiveness. Thanks to centralized management, your environment becomes more consistent, your applications are secure, and you’re complying with all international requirements.

Oh, and don’t worry. That one data center in the middle of nowhere? It’s been taken care of as well.
 

SoftServe is a Google Cloud Premier Partner specializing in Machine Learning, IoT, Infrastructure, Cloud Migration & Data Analytics. We’re proud to have a certified Anthos fellow along with the designation of “Anthos: Hybrid/Multi-Cloud App Platform” expertise within the Google partner program.

Our experts are focused on Application Modernization with Anthos + Apigee and can specialize and support the entire Anthos family—including infrastructure, Data, AI, ML, and Apigee Hybrid.

READY TO GET STARTED?