As we know about different services in the Google cloud platform, Anthos is one of them. In this blog we are going to cover everything related to Google Cloud Anthos, Topics we’ll discuss are:
- What is Google Cloud Anthos?
- Features of Cloud Anthos
- Components of Cloud Anthos
- Use cases of Cloud Anthos
- Pricing of Cloud Anthos
- Step-by-Step Guide to Set up Anthos on Google Cloud
What is Google Cloud Anthos?
Google Cloud Anthos is a platform that helps in developing and running Kubernetes-based applications on Google’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE), it is an open-source project which manages container services for the company’s Cloud Platform. Anthos currently runs natively on Google Cloud Platform, on bare metal servers in enterprise data centers and in public clouds, and on VMware vSphere servers within a customer data center.
It is a hybrid, cloud-agnostic container environment. It is a software product that enables enterprises to use container clusters instead of cloud virtual machines (VMs) to bridge gaps between legacy software and cloud hardware. Google Cloud Anthos, sometimes you can call it just Anthos, was initially launched under the name of Google Cloud Services Platform and later rebranded into Google Cloud Anthos in 2019.
Features of Google Cloud Anthos
- Flexible Working: Google Anthos is a platform that is designed to allow users to run applications on-premise. It is a service provider agnostic, and not just only works with Apple Cloud Platform but with AWS, Azure, and others as well.
- Open source: It is an open-source project built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) which manages the container services for its cloud platform. Given its open platform, Anthos also provides the flexibility of running an application unmodified on the public cloud or on-prem hardware in a simple and secure manner.
- Consistency: It is designed to provide a consistent user experience on the Kubernetes platforms. Users can now easily focus on a single technology and gain operational consistencies across hybrid and public clouds, It is built on a set of open technologies; So the vendor locking can be avoided
- Auto-scaling: Google Anthos also provides the benefit of auto-scaling, where you will only pay for your usage by resizing the number of nodes based on traffic.
Components Of Cloud Anthos
Google Cloud Anthos is designed using multiple systems. Anthos’ core, however, is a container cluster that is managed by Google Kubernetes Engine. In order to accommodate hybrid environments, Google Cloud Anthos supports the Google Kubernetes Engine managed container service and a GKE On-Premises environment, that contains the same set of management and security features, some other components of Google Cloud Anthos include:
- Google Kubernetes Engine: This is basically the heart of Anthos which performs various activities like:
- Management of Kubernetes cluster and the applications depending upon it.
- Monitoring the applications and switching the loads between on-premises and cloud.
- It lets you reserve the IP addresses via Google cloud VPN, and lets you allocate the compute resources to a cluster, scaling up or scaling down the deployment according to memory demands
- Anthos Config Management: Navigating workloads for a hybrid-cloud solution is really a complex thing. Developers must ensure that configurations are applied across multiple clusters and avoid errors that affect both cloud environments. Anthos Config Management manages & handles the deployment of Kubernetes objects across different clusters regardless of platform
- Traffic Director: It is a traffic control plane for a service mesh that adds multi-region load balancing, health checking as well as demand-based auto-scaling.
- Migrate For Anthos: while modernizing applications, migrating the workloads from VMs to containers is the primary obstacle. With the help of Migrate for Anthos tool, application migration and modernization become an easy and single-step process.
- Istio: It lets you connect GCP, third-party clouds, databases, and other components in a single service mesh, supporting load balancing, monitoring of large numbers of clusters, and traffic management. It provides capabilities like circuit-breakers, timeouts and retries, active and passive health checks, and rapid recovery from failures at the user level.
- GKE on-Prem: With this, you can run fully-managed Kubernetes clusters in your data center, managing them in the GCP console alongside cloud-based clusters. Designed for on-premises deployments, this is a virtual appliance that runs on top of VMware vSphere 6.5.
- Cloud Run: This is a complete serverless and fully managed compute platform that enables users to run stateless containers which can be invoked via pub/sub-events or web requests. It can automatically size compute resources in accordance with workload demands.
- GCP Marketplace: This will allow Anthos users to access prebuilt Kubernetes development stacks and applications on a GCP Marketplace. The marketplace can also automate the container development processes using the CodeBuild.
Use-Cases of Cloud Anthos
- Modernize existing Java applications with Anthos: Java application modernization comprises three stages: lifting and modernizing the suitable applications from running in VMs to running into containers without rewriting any code; deploying the containerized applications to Anthos by using some of the modern continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices; and refactoring applications to OSS application stacks, modern frameworks, and microservices over time
Image source: Google
- Modern CI/CD with Anthos: Modernizing your approaches to application configuration, continuous integration, policy management, and deployment automation with expert guidance from Kubernetes and Google Cloud engineers. Traditional software development and delivery often meant expensive and immobile proprietary tools. Google Cloud’s approach uses open source, making it portable as well as vendor-neutral.
Image source: Google
- Migrating Cloud Foundry applications using Kf: As your teams standardize on Kubernetes, migrating from the existing platforms like Cloud Foundry is often the biggest & tough challenge. Kf is designed to help your teams minimize any disruption to developer workflows during the migration to Anthos. It enables a phased migration journey, with the first phase focusing on application platform standardization, and the second one focused on app modernization
Image source: Google
Pricing of Cloud Anthos
- Anthos comes with a monthly subscription service with a minimum of one-year commitment and a base price of $10K/month for a 100 vCPU block
- Further vCPUs can be purchased in blocks of 100vCPUs whenever usage exceeds the preceding block. For example, a workload using 150 vCPUs will require 2 blocks of 100 vCPUs each
- Cloud Anthos will also automatically add up the additional blocks whenever usage exceeds the amount purchased
Step-by-Step Guide to Set up Anthos on Google Cloud
1. Log in to your Google Cloud Platform account
Note: If you don’t have a free trial account then check our Step-by-Step guide to create your Google Cloud Free-trial account now.
2. Select your existing project or if you do not have one then click on create a new project
3. Make sure that billing is enabled for your project
4. Enable the Anthos API
Registering Cluster to the Fleet
5. In the Cloud Console, go to the Anthos Clusters page. Here you can see all your Registered Clusters
6. Click on Register existing cluster
7. Click Register next to the unregistered cluster that you want to add to your fleet
Enabling Anthos Features
Now that you have registered your cluster to the fleet, you can enable any Anthos features to your project, For example, if you want to enable Anthos config management then here are the steps to follow:
9. Open cloud shell from Google Cloud Console
10. Run the following command:
gcloud beta container hub config-management enable
Conclusion
As we have study about Google Cloud Anthos, I hope everything is clear to you and you are ready to use its features, Here are some of the key benefits of Anthos you can have:
- Hybrid and Multi-cloud Scalability and Interoperability
- Containerization and Cloud Migration
- Security
- Jurisdiction and Data Sovereignty
Related References
- GCP Professional Cloud Architect: Everything You Need To Know
- Google Professional Cloud Architect: Step-By-Step Hands On Guide
- Introduction To Google Cloud Platform
- Google Cloud Services & Tools
- Introduction to Google Cloud Run
- Deploying An Application To A GKE Cluster
- Google Cloud Functions
- Google Cloud Deployment Manager: Overview & Hands-on Guide
Next Task For You
If you are also interested and want to know more about the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification then register for our Free Class.
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