Anthos clusters on Bare metal allows you to install Anthos Clusters directly on bare metal servers and provides the flexibility to enterprises to run Anthos Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters directly on their own environment/on-premises data centre.
Enterprises can deploy and run cloud-native/container applications directly on GKE clusters running in their own environment on supported hardware and operating systems, without the overhead of any virtualized environment.
The GKE clusters can be centrally managed using the Google Cloud console (through Connect) and leverage the central monitoring and logging capabilities through Cloud Monitoring. Running Anthos clusters directly on your own infrastructure, gives the same unified capabilities of managing and monitoring Anthos on the cloud with improved performance, security, cost and direct control of the applications running inside your own enterprise infrastructure.
Anthos Clusters on Bare metal allow enterprises to deploy data and compute workloads at the edge locations – closer to end-users or systems, to realize use cases which require ultra-low latency capabilities or near real-time decision making.
With IoT and 5G gaining momentum, in future we would see new class of applications which requires new set of requirements like near-real time decision making, ultra-low-latency streaming applications, immersive and 3D experiences and the whole notion of collective intelligence where humans and system would learn from each other.
Industries need to be agile and be prepared for such transformation in future. For instance, various industrial automation use cases like condition based monitoring, predictive maintenance, using Augment Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) for inspecting the manufacturing plants etc, all requires edge computing to process data at the edge and take corrective actions quickly. Similarly, consumer driven use cases like using digital mirrors for trying apparel outfits, use of AR/VR applications for immersive online education in schools/university, connected environment usecases (connected home, connected cars etc..) , all would require applications running on the edge to provide real-time and true connected experience.
With Anthos Clusters on Bare metal, all the above use cases I described above, becomes a reality and you can leverage the same unified capabilities of Anthos platform (that I described in Chapter 1) to build, deploy, manage, secure and govern cloud-native applications at the edge location.
Next we look at how to install Anthos Clusters on Bare metal.