Google Cloud Anthos – Essential introduction

Anthos is described by google on their documentation as

Anthos is a managed application platform that extends Google Cloud services and engineering practices to your environments so you can modernize apps faster and establish operational consistency across them.

Anthos Modern Application Platform  |  Google Cloud

So, what is Anthos?

Anthos is not a technology or tool but it’s a brand. Technically it is a wrapper around the kubernetes. Anthos is the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) deployed on-premises in a certified configuration. with an agent installed that maintains an encrypted connection to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). That agent lets you manage your Anthos cluster and its workloads from the GCP console, deploying and scaling applications.

Anthos Components

Google Kubernetes Engine

At the heart of Anthos is the enterprise-grade container orchestration and management service, GKE on-prem. You can run your Kubernetes clusters reliably and efficiently on-premises using Anthos GKE on-prem. It makes container management easy, with quick, managed, and simple installs as well as upgrades validated by Google. Read more @ https://cloud.google.com/anthos/gke

Anthos Config Management

You can automate policy and security at scale for your Kubernetes deployments with Anthos Config Management. It powers rapid and secure application development, enabling you to create a common configuration for administrative policies that apply to your Kubernetes clusters both on-premises and in the cloud. You can evaluate changes and roll them out to all Kubernetes clusters so that your desired state is always reflected. Read more @ https://cloud.google.com/anthos/config-management

Anthos Service Mesh

Google Cloud’s fully managed Service Mesh lets you manage complex microservices architectures so that you can get all the benefits of microservices without the overheads. It allows you to configure, control, secure and monitor your services in one place, taking a significant burden off your operations and development teams. Read more @ https://cloud.google.com/anthos/service-mesh

Serverless

You can run stateless containers in a fully managed, auto-scaling compute platform using Cloud Run for Anthos, which is based on the open-source Knative project. Cloud Run will enable apps to use container-run functions without configuring servers. Additionally, Cloud Run can also automatically size compute resources according to workload demands. Read more @ Cloud Run: Container to production in seconds  |  Google Cloud

logging and monitoring

Anthos includes Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring for system components. Built-in observability for Google Cloud is provided through Stackdriver. It offers a fully managed logging solution, metrics collection, monitoring, dashboarding, and alerting. Stackdriver monitors GKE on-prem clusters in a similar way to cloud-based GKE clusters.

Cloud Audit Logs allows you to capture and analyse the interactions that your applications and human users are having with your control components. Kubernetes Engine Monitoring provides an automatic and idiomatic integration that stores your application’s critical metrics for use in debugging, alerting, and post-incident analysis.

Prometheus and Grafana can be enabled on each admin cluster and user cluster, if you prefer using these technologies

_{At the time of writing this article, Cloud Audit Logs and Kubernetes Engine Monitoring are currently available only for Anthos on Google Cloud but will be available for Anthos clusters on VMware in future releases.}

Read more @ Cloud Logging | Google Cloud

Google cloud market place

For easy installation and management of third-party applications, you can use Google Cloud Marketplace, which can deploy to your Anthos clusters no matter where they are running. You can also search and filter for Anthos apps and easily find Anthos compatible solutions with the Anthos badge. See more @ Marketplace – Google Cloud Platform

Anthos for migration

For migration, Anthos includes Migrate for Anthos. Migrate for Anthos is a tool to containerize existing VM-based applications to run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or Anthos. Migrate for Anthos provides a fast and simple way to move to modernized orchestration and application management without requiring access to source code, rewriting, or re-architecting applications. Read more @ Migrate for Anthos  |  Google Cloud

Read Anthos technical overview @ https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview