Google Cloud Set To Announce GA Of Anthos On AWS

Google Cloud also will disclose that Anthos on Microsoft Azure is being tested with customers and Anthos support for virtual machines is in early preview with customers.

Google Cloud, which continues to boost the capabilities of its hybrid and multi-cloud Anthos platform, soon will announce the general availability of Anthos on AWS, according to the No. 3 cloud provider.

Google Cloud planned to herald the development at its Next ’20: Digital Connect event that was set to start online today before being postponed amid the deadly coronavirus crisis. It did not provide guidance on the new timing for the announcement.

Google Cloud also told CRN it plans to disclose that Anthos on Microsoft Azure now is being tested with customers and Anthos support for virtual machines (VMs) is in early preview with customers. The latter will enable organizations to “bring policy and automation for both containerized and VM-based workloads -- no matter where they are in their modernization journey -- through Anthos,” Google Cloud told CRN.

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The progress on Anthos is a big step forward in Google Cloud delivering on its vision for the platform, said Mark Brose, vice president of engineering at Agosto, a Minneapolis Google Cloud Premier Partner and cloud services and development company.

“From Agosto’s perspective, as the market continues to grow for application modernization, this hybrid cloud approach will give enterprises the flexibility to deploy and run advanced applications wherever they need to, without the need for development teams to learn or adjust to the nuances of each environment,” Brose said. “Many of our customers are already leveraging AWS and Azure in addition to GCP (Google Cloud Platform), and this will enable these businesses to streamline their application management across those platforms.”

As for the VM support, Brose said it provides an “initial stepping stone for workloads that aren’t yet on the modernization roadmap.”

Having a “consistent” Google Kubernetes Engine on multiple clouds, along with the capacity for “one source of truth for configuration across all k8s (Kubernetes) clusters, should reduce or eliminate barriers to deploying a common platform at whichever level is most appropriate for the customers' business, be that in a single data center, multiple clouds or a fully hybridized environment,” said Michael Madison, a Google Cloud Certified Fellow and cloud platform architect at World Wide Technology, a St. Louis-based GCP Premier Partner that’s No. 8 on the CRN SP500.

Customer Adoption

Google Cloud launched its fully managed Anthos platform a year ago to allow customers to build and manage applications across on-premises data centers, GCP and rival clouds.

Anthos is seeing “very good momentum” among customers and partners, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told CRN in an exclusive interview at the cloud provider’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters last month.

Cleveland-based KeyBank uses Anthos to optimize its test, development and delivery processes across an on-premises environment and GCP, and retailer Kohl’s uses it across GCP and other public clouds. Other customers include HSBC, Kaeser Kompressoren, DenizBank and OpenText.

“We are seeing a lot of customer interest on ensuring that they can build applications and decouple where they’re building the application and where it can run,” Kurian said. “It’s the choice that it gives them.”

SADA Systems is “incredibly excited about the increasing value Anthos is delivering to users and the future for this crucial product line,” according to Miles Ward, chief technology officer at the Google Cloud Premier Partner, whose headquarters is in Los Angeles.

"It can be hard to turn a ‘battleship,’ but once you do, you have a ‘battleship’ pointed in the right direction,” Ward said. “Google Cloud is deeply aligned behind the vision for Anthos. We're watching them pull out all the stops on engineering.”

With a new, unique technology or platform, there typically are several waves of actual adoption, which is precisely what happened with Anthos, according to Arseny Gorokh, head of Google competency at EPAM, a Newtown, Pa., Anthos service partner.

“After the initial launch and quite a great deal of hype surrounding its release, many enterprise clients started evaluating their cloud journey and including Anthos -- and the overall multi-/hybrid-cloud approach -- into their roadmaps,” Gorokh said. “We’ve seen an uptick in these conversations with clients, especially with our customers in the healthcare and financial services verticals.”

With today’s market conditions, EPAM is seeing more clients trying to maximize efficiency and seamless collaboration, which, as of late, involves more thought leadership around using a multi-cloud and/or hybrid-cloud strategy, according to Gorokh.

“It’s hard not to lead with Anthos in these instances, as Google has made it easy for customers to run mission-critical workloads on Google Cloud Platform or on-premise,” he said, noting the next step is the mainstream adoption of Anthos and specific implementation projects.

“From a multi-cloud perspective, we’ve seen our clients with established, mature AWS and Azure environments and existing home-grown orchestration tools start to consider Anthos for this role – to reduce total cost of ownership, and because Anthos offers a clear roadmap and an established cadence for releasing new functionality,” Gorokh said.