Google Anthos Platform

Sindhu Shree
Posted by Sindhu Shree June 22, 2022

Google Anthos Platform

 

Among the recent Google launches, Google Anthos Platform stands out. Anthos let Google to officially enter the enterprise data center. Anthos is one of the first official multi-cloud platform from a public cloud provider.

Anthos is a multicloud platform by Google that is designed to allow users to run applications on-premise in not just Google Cloud, but also in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Built on the concept of ‘write once and run anywhere’, it is the first hybrid multi-cloud platform for Google. The components in Anthos makes it one of the most powerful multi-cloud platforms. Simplification of development, deployment and operations of applications across hybrid and multiple public clouds by bridging incompatible cloud architectures are few of the features that encourages one to use Anthos Platform. It acts as a single platform for the management of all Kubernetes workloads and allows customers to focus on a single technology, rather than relying on a multitude of proprietary cloud technologies. Anthos is a combination of the Google Cloud managed service Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), GKE On-Prem, Anthos Config Management console for unified administration, policies and security across hybrid and multicloud Kubernetes deployments.

 

Key features in Anthos:

  1. Anthos is highly reliable. The deployed clusters can be put in a high availability (HA) mode with control pane instances and node poll placed in multiple availability zones.
  2. The number of nodes can be resized based on the traffic. This auto scaling feature enables the user to pay only for what is used.
  3. Anthos works with AWS and Microsoft Azure. This integration leverages the existing security groups to secure the clusters.
  4. Workload in the Google Cloud Platform and AWS can be managed very easily from one place.
  5. Anthos Configuration Management and Mesh services can be used to connect and manage all resources in AWS and, policies can be set on the AWS workloads.

The components of Anthos:

  1. Google Kubernetes Engine: This is the core of Anthos. GKE control panel allows users to manage distributed infrastructure in on-premise data, Google’s cloud and other cloud platforms. GKE on-premise platform is a software platform based on Kubernetes and consistent with GKE. By upgrading to the latest Kubernetes version to placing in the most recent patches, GKE can be logically extended.
  2. Istio Service Mesh: This component enables the federated network management throughout the platform. As the name suggests, it acts as a mesh holding together different applications’ components spread across GCP, data centers and clouds. It aids in seamless integration with software-defined networks such as ACI, Cisco, VMware, NSX and Andromeda.
  3. Velostrata: This is a cloud migration technology that helps in converting existing VMs into Pods (Kubernetes applications) and streaming on-premise virtual and physical machines to generate clones in GCE instances. This is first migration tool built by Google.
  4. Anthos Configuration Management: Kubernetes is a policy-driven, extensible platform and Google uses it to simplify its configuration management with Anthos. It enables users to apply and maintain configurations from deployment of artifacts to network policies configuration settings. It is a secure, version-controlled central cache of everything about configuration and administration.
  5. Stackdriver: This is an element of observability to the core Anthos infrastructure and its applications. It monitors central logging, tracing and monitoring system customers and determine the health of individual applications within each group.

 

The Anthos Sample Deployment on Google Cloud is a Google Cloud Marketplace solution that deploys a hands-on environment with a GKE cluster, service mesh and an application with multiple microservices.

Key features of Anthos during the deployment tasks include:

  1. Deploying Anthos environment with clusters, applications and Anthos components like Anthos Service Mesh and Anthos Config Management.
  2. Using Google Cloud Console to explore the Anthos GKE resources used by the applications.
  3. Anthos Service Mesh to observe application services.

 

Below are the provisions that Anthos provides with the deployment of the project:

  1. One GKE cluster running on Google Cloud.
  2. Anthos Service Mesh installed on the cluster, to manage service mesh.
  3. Application running on the cluster, including all the microservices written in programming languages like Java, Python and JavaScript.
  4. A single compute Engine instance to perform several automated tasks after the cluster is created.
  5. A VPC with a subnetwork with the target deployment region for the GKE cluster and Compute Engine instance. A Cloud NAT gateway on a Cloud Router, and firewall rules for connectivity to and between the deployment’s components.

 

The deployment is a straight-forward process once all the prerequisites are met. The deployment configuration screen lets you choose deployment name, zone and service amount. Once deployed, it would take up to 15 minutes. During deployment, the Cloud Console transitions to Deployment Manager view. The entire deployment can be reviewed.

 

Anthos Dashboard provides a structured view of all the applications’ resources including clusters, services and workloads and provides a view of the resources at a high level and lets you drill down to low-level information when required.

 

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