During the Google Cloud Next'21 virtual event, Google announced the preview of Anthos for Virtual Machines(VMs). Furthermore, the company introduced a new Anthos Multi-Cloud API, which will become generally available in Q4.
Anthos is a hybrid cloud and workload management service that runs on the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). With support for VMs, customers can standardize on Kubernetes while running some workloads that cannot be easily containerized in virtual machines. And the Multi-Cloud API will help customers to manage Kubernetes clusters on AWS and Azure cloud environments. Customers can run this API from the command line interface or the Google Cloud Console.
The VM support for Anthos allows customers to either:
- Attach their vSphere VMs or shift their VMs as-is - when having active VMware environments, the Anthos control plane can now connect to their vSphere environment and attach their vSphere VMs. This connection will allow them to apply consistent security and policies across clusters, gain visibility into the health and performance of their services, and manage traffic for both VMs and containers.
- Or move VMs as-is onto Anthos with KubeVirt, an open-source virtualization API for Kubernetes – allowing them to build, modify, and deploy applications residing in both application containers as well as VMs on a common, shared Anthos environment - an excellent choice for organizations that prefer to use open-source virtualization and are running Anthos on bare metal.
Google Application Modernization Platform vice-presidents Jeff Reed and Chen Goldberg wrote in a Google blog post:
While we have seen many customers make the leap to containerization, some are not quite ready to move completely off of virtual machines (VMs). They want a unified development platform where developers can build, modify, and deploy applications residing in both containers and VMs in a common, shared environment.
In addition, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
Google has seen excellent success with Anthos and has signed handily forced the market to support each competitor's cloud. Now it is pushing the capabilities of Anthos onwards on an extensive basis. The most important is the addition of VM capabilities, as enterprises operate on VMs. If Google can make Anthos the new home for VMs, it will help Google Cloud to close the gap towards Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Lastly, related to Anthos, the company also announced the general availability (GA) of Anthos Config Management and Anthos Service Mesh for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as standalone services with pay-as-you-go pricing.