The deployment options of Anthos can be primarily bucketed into the following three categories –
- Hybrid deployment
- Edge deployment
- Multicloud capability
Hybrid cloud deployment
Many enterprises have built their infrastructure on-prem by employing virtualization technologies like VMware vSphere or having a host of physical servers. This is particularly true for enterprises where lot of compliance and regulations exists where customer data cannot cross geographical boundaries or cannot reside in the public cloud.
These organizations are looking at multiple consistent ways to be agile and deliver modern applications quickly. Based on their cloud adoption and transformation, the enterprises can be at various stages such as –
- Infrastructure modernization – Consolidating and optimizing their infrastructure.
- App Modernization – Modernizing or evolving their applications by moving towards cloud native solutions for faster deployment and agility.
- Extending their workloads to cloud – Looking to extend their on-prem infrastructure to cloud for better optimization, scalability or running non-sensitive workloads.
In each of above approaches, organizations need a unified ways to develop and manage applications at scale, across on-prem and cloud environments.
Based on what technologies the customer uses and where they are in their cloud journey, the following 2 Anthos offerings can be adopted –
Anthos clusters on VMware
Customers who have existing investments in VMware vSphere and want to leverage capabilities offered by GKE to create, manage and deploy containers applications or migrate the on-prem Virtual Machines to native containers, can start with Anthos clusters on VMware offering.
This could be a good starting point to consolidate and modernize the existing infrastructure where containers can reside on-prem and be managed effectively using the same lifecycle of Anthos clusters and later migrate the required applications to cloud.
New development workloads (no-sensitive compute) can be moved to the cloud and be optimized through auto scaling. The entire infrastructure can be managed through Cloud Console and security policies can be rolled out for GKE clusters hosted on on-prem and on cloud.
Enterprise can also use Migrate for Anthos offering to covert Virtual machine workloads to containers that can be deployed directly to Anthos clusters.
Anthos on Bare Metal
For customers who run physical servers (without the overhead of virtualization) as part of their existing enterprise infrastructure, can rely on Anthos on Bare Metal offering to deploy Anthos applications directly on their hardware infrastructure.
Anthos clusters on bare metal can be centrally managed using the Google Cloud console (through Connect) and monitoring and logging through Cloud Monitoring. This 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.
Edge deployment
For customers who are looking to build and deploy cloud native applications that require data and compute to be located closer to end-users to provide real-time, ultra-low latency and immersive experience or on resource constrained hardware, can deploy Anthos applications directly on their hardware infrastructure.
The next generation applications would drive new set of requirements like near real-time decision making, low latency streaming, gaming and virtual experience and collective intelligence. With adoption of Internet of Things, every object in the world would have the potential to connect to the Internet and provide their data so as to derive actionable insights on its own or through other connected objects. To realize this vision for Internet of Things, Edge computing would play a very critical role. Industries need to be agile and prepared for transformation.
For example virtual mall shopping, trying outfits using digital mirrors/changing rooms, Fashion advisor bots suggesting outfits based on your persona, can provide the same real-life experience in future. Similarly, there is a great opportunity to transform the education and the entire on-line learning experience to be immersive, interactive and more conductive/friendly for students.
All these systems requires ultra-low latency and deploying Anthos applications on the edge (and managed from the cloud) can provide the required solution.
With Anthos on Bare Metal, this becomes a reality where you can extend existing hybrid or multi-cloud model on the edge to provide computing and central management of edge clouds through a unified way.
Multicloud deployment
One of the strategic decisions that enterprises need to take is how they can be cloud-agnostic due to various drivers that includes cost model, customer affinity towards a particular cloud vendor, availability of cloud regions, disaster recovery strategy or compliance and regulations.
Going forward, we see multicloud support would be a key strategic decision being adopted by many enterprises.
Even though, multicloud support may not be a current priority for your enterprises, enterprises should adopt cloud native applications and principles, so it can help transition to multicloud environment seamlessly based on future requirements. In this way, enterprises can be multicloud ready.
With Anthos, you get a unified development and deployment experience across environments and a single management view across your multi-cloud environment.