10 ms·

Anthos support for multi-cloud is generally available

189 points by 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

odensc 7y ago
So what does "Google Cloud's fully managed Anthos" do in non-marketing speak? I'm not exactly sure what a "multi-cloud and hybrid application platform" providing "agility and flexibility" is supposed to do for me as a "born-in-the-cloud digital native or a traditional enterprise."
- cfors 7y ago
  From my understanding it's a managed Istio service.
  - igetspam 7y ago
    Thank you. Searching for anthos and istio got me the info I needed. Istio, when finally configured, is pretty fantastic. Leveraging it for multi cloud clusters is already possible so a service that streamlines that feels like a natural step. Terrible blog post. Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out.
    - bogomipz 7y ago
      I'm curious how exactly are people leveraging Istio for multicloud at the moment? Is this via an advanced Istio feature or some other Kubernetes-related project?
      - robertlagrant 7y ago
        You can use Istio for this already, where one cluster is the master: https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/shared-gateways/ https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/share... I've never tried across cloud providers, and so I don't know if latency would be a factor, but I think in theory it could work. You can also join clusters with Istio just for admin and network traffic, i.e. one cluster with Istio in Azure and another cluster with Istio in AWS, talking via the mesh infrastructure. https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/gateways/ https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/gatew...
    - uoaei 7y ago
      > Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out. Unfortunately not even Googlers are immune to the draw to elite signalling by drowning your copy in industry jargon without ever getting to the point. I see this a lot on hastily-composed GitHub Readmes and "rocket-launch" startup landing pages, but it's a shame it also happens to a company whose name is globally recognized.
      - derefr 7y ago
        > the draw to elite signalling I don't feel like that's why we all sometimes do this (though that might be an inside view and I might really be signalling along with everyone else.) I feel like the internal thought-process that motivates this kinds of inside-baseball writing is twofold (depending on the stage of the project): - early on: "the only people who could possibly care about something this new are people with the exact problem it solves, who stumbled onto it when jamming google full of enough keywords that there are zero other results; they already know what this does before reading; and they just want to confirm that it isn't fatally flawed. They're deploying this project in anger. (Of course they are; if they didn't desperately need it, they'd never rely on something so early in development!)" - later on: "We're selling this to customers. We've picked a specific target market that has specific use-cases and needs, and we try to think about things the way they think about things 100% of the time, because talking to those people is what gets us money. We don't do any inbound marketing—we aren't trying to passively educate anyone outside our target market to get them interested. We're having enough trouble capturing the pre-qualified part of our funnel with in-person conversations. Converting people who haven't even fallen into the funnel yet? Who cares! They might get converted by accident if someone who already uses us takes the time to explain our product to them; but otherwise, the only time they'll hear about us is when we reach out to slowly warm them up for a million-dollar enterprise deal."
        searchableguy 7y ago
        Or they don't care about what you (the engineer) thinks as long as your non-engineer manager is impressed and convinced your team needs it to grow.
  - thankswell 7y ago
    Anthos is a multi-cloud software delivery system, i.e. it ships Google Cloud softwares to everywhere including VMware and AWS. Istio is just its traffic/proxy layer across clouds.
  - sorum 7y ago
    Istio is part of the service. As far as my knowledge goes, the main components of Anthos are: - Anthos GKE: managed Kubernetes across GCP, AWS, on-prem via VMware vSphere - Anthos service mesh: Istio + SRE practices (Cloud Operations) - Cloud Run: Knative serverless - Anthos Config Mgmt: policy & security automation - Marketplace: 3rd party applications for Anthos Disclaimer: work for Google, but nowhere near an expert on Anthos. Just going off of some notes I took last week.
    - robertlagrant 7y ago
      That's a pretty cool set of things, at least in theory. Wouldn't mind a project where I could try them all out!
- thethethethe 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I work for GOOG and my opinions are my own My understanding is that Anthos is a multi cloud platform which essentially enables you to run managed Kubernetes on-prem, in GCP, and other public clouds. You can then run other Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Run, on your own hardware or in other clouds in addition to GCP
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    How does the billing work? Does the customer pay AWS directly, or does the customer pay Google who pays AWS? If the former, does the service itself depend on Google being up, or could Google go bankrupt and my on-prem hardware keep running Cloud Run?
    - foota 7y ago
      Definitely not the former. I imagine you have to set up some auth stuff for it to work.
      - 411111111111111 7y ago
        How are you certain? Have you worked with anthos before? Technologically both is possible.
        foota 7y ago
        I haven't, but the liability would be insane.
- rmac 7y ago
  it's knative, istio, managed gke, a VPN tunnel into other infra, scripts to migrate stuff, and IAM middleware.
  - odensc 7y ago
    Thanks... It was near impossible to find a summary like this even on their product page.
- rkagerer 7y ago
  Glad you asked. Even the main Anthos landing page leaves me scratching my head.
- mike_d 7y ago
  It's Google's managed kubernetes. But AWS, Azure, and your on-prem hardware appear as availability zones and workloads can shift between them.
  - nindalf 7y ago
    Would have been nice if they could have mentioned this in that 1200 word post. Sometimes we criticise folks who read the comments before the link, but crappy links like this train us to do that.
    - xtony 7y ago
      Engineers are probably not the audience of this post.
      - hsaliak 7y ago
        I disagree. Consider it the other way - it is common wisdom to keep broad communications simple enough for a 5 year old to understand. It follows that even marketing speak needs to be so simple that 5 year olds (us, engineers) can understand. Especially so when we are the fortunate users.
  - ivankirigin 7y ago
    It's incredible how much better your sentence is than their blog post.
- nihil75 7y ago
  Every corp has one of these "fully-managed all-in-one just plug in your Java contractors" solutions. Aimed at executives, these stacks run trivial applications at an extreme price, leaving DevOps folks to roll their eyes and ask for a transfer.
  - robertlagrant 7y ago
    I really don't think this is what you think it is.
- eb0la 7y ago
  Anthos was called GkE-on-prem about 1 year ago. It allows you to manage a Kubernetes cluster from GCP that can have resurces mixed from both on-prem and google services (now you can also have pods on AWS). For on-prem you'll need a WMWare hypervisor on your servers. Why this is useful? - Regulation: some workloads can be run only on-prem due to regulation (for instance, in Spain you can only process gambling data in the same region/comunidad autonoma you have the business). - Cloud offloading of K8s workloads - you can workloads onprem off-peak and mixed loads cloud+onprem on peak times. - Google Cloud Marketplace : you can deploy solutions from GCP Marketlplace on Anthos (that is, on your hardware, now also on other clouds). - (now) Onprem + Multicloud workloads: Multicloud is hard. Not just having to know well how stuff works on each cloud, but also having to deal with rough interactions between clouds (even with k8s). Disclaimer: I work for a Google cloud partner.
  - gigatexal 7y ago
    The deal breaker for my for me is the VMware component. That licensing is too costly and a silly move imo as if they could do this without that hypervisor and use something free like Xen or KVM they’d have a ton more adoption.
    - eb0la 7y ago
      Google plans to have Anthos on bare metal by year's end. For me that's one of the biggest adoption barriers because unless you already have that VMware licences, you'll have to burn a lot of CapEX to run Anthos. I hope they don't make us pay for both the bare metal license and the by-cpu license (or it is a _very_ small amount).
      - gigatexal 7y ago
        That will be really neat.
      - tyldum 7y ago
        Was quoted a minimum of $10k/month per region. On top of hardware and VMware licenses. Insane.
- tonypujals 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I work for Google as a senior developer advocate for Anthos. If you are a hands-on dev (probably the majority of people here), even if you help feed information to the C-suite, I can definitely see how the article probably comes across as "marketing speak" for you. However, I do want to note that having had the opportunity to sit in a number of customer meetings with very large enterprise customers and listen to our VP in conversations with their senior executive leadership, her article is intended to address concerns in a way that resonates with them. This article targets executive decision makers who need to commit enormous resources to long term strategies and it is important for them to hear in a language they understand that they will have enough flexibility to solve existing as well as evolving and shifting needs in the long run. Many customers are trying to navigate their way to a successful modernization path that gives them the ability to run their workloads where they need to, helps them to apply modern best practices, and gives them unified management, monitoring, and compliance and auditing controls. Many of them are on prem and have VMware licenses right now, or have already begun implementing some kind of hybrid cloud strategy, or are even considering multi-cloud approaches. For those of you looking for more practical information, we hear you. We were already preparing to launch new content directly targeted for developers to give you a direct, hands-on experience with Anthos using live clusters and a running application as part of Next. Unfortunately due to changing conditions, we had to take a phased approach to communicating this as part of moving everything to completely digital formats. However, the good news is that you will be able to explore Anthos on Google Cloud for yourself and I'm really looking forward to sharing those details very soon.
  - tonypujals 6y ago
    I promised to share some news, so here it is. You can now try out for free. I'm pretty excited about this. The team worked hard to make sure you can spin up a deployment on Anthos with just a few clicks and explore it yourself. Details here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/explore-anthos-with-a-sample-deployment https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/explore-anthos-w...
sbassi 7y ago
Is this product open source? I can't trust Google products since they end it up at any time. https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/
- chx 7y ago
  https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview https://github.com/istio/istio https://github.com/istio/istio
- pseudobry 7y ago
  Not saying you're wrong, but I'm having a hard time finding GCP products that had paying enterprise customers at the link you provided, at least none with Greek names.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    Not there yet, but Hades is a Greek name: They should name a product Hades and then kill is just so gcemetary has, you know, appropriate oversight & leadership.
- ceohockey60 7y ago
  Kubernetes, the technology that Anthos manages for users, is open source. The code base that does that managing is not open source afaik.
- jasonvorhe 7y ago
  This isn't helpful. Google's enterprise offerings are not consumer products that must teach x amount of daily active users in order to survive.
awinter-py 7y ago
> In business as in life, change is constant and unpredictable. When building the platforms to power your organization, you can’t be limited by yesterday’s technology decisions. Nor can the systems you create today constrain your ability to act tomorrow. was expecting 1st paragraph to be 'anthos is a' But I like this too, it's like the philosophy cult ads on the subway the first customer they quote is a 200 yr old bank. 'in my day kubernetes was a lunch place on stone st'
mayank 7y ago
It's quite weird that a Google blog post about a highly technical product doesn't include a link to the actual technical details: https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview
- heyoni 7y ago
  Thank you. And seriously, that was so much marketing gibberish, I had no idea what they were trying to feed me.
  - monkeydust 7y ago
    As someone who feeds up to the 'C suite'.. This is the sort of thing that would hit my inbox and I would have to make sense of it. I think marketing need to realise the C suite is changing.
- mike_d 7y ago
  They are trying to compete with Azure, which is sold in the boardroom - not to developers. I know of at least one company where they had to blacklist AWS and GCP on corp cards because developers were still trying to use them despite the company having signed a multi-hundred million dollar deal with Azure.
  - trhway 7y ago
    >They are trying to compete with Azure, which is sold in the boardroom - not to developers. Looks like an Oracle style approach (couldn't find that famous Larry's quote that developers don't grasp the concerns what he is discussing with the C-suites), and this GCP offering is the first big one under the new GCP leadership transplanted from Oracle. This is probably the new look and feel of GCP going forward.
seph-reed 7y ago
So very tired of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Firefox, and Apple release articles. It's not that I don't understand they're important to a lot of developers and totally belong here. Time to search for a content filter though. Edit: I mean look at it! It's basically an advertisement. It feels like Kardashians of coding.
judge2020 7y ago
> One such early adopter is Plaid, a Japanese tech company providing real-time visibility into user activity online. Plaid’s customers rely on their always-available analytics service to make changes in real-time and continuously improve the user experience. Edit: They're talking about a different company Odd categorization of Plaid, they (at least primarily) provide an API for linking (logging in to) users' bank accounts and scraping information from the bank websites.
- sbader 7y ago
  It's a different company: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plaid-inc https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plaid-inc
  - judge2020 7y ago
    Ah, my bad.
atonse 7y ago
"At Plaid we provide real-time data analysis of over 6.8 billion online users" err what? Not even Facebook has 6.8 billion users. Or probably not even CloudFlare. Is this part of the Visa acquisition? Maybe they'd have that many users but I still kind of doubt "online users."
- stevewodil 7y ago
  Yeah I thought the total number of people with internet access was under 5 billion. But also, it's a different company, not the fintech Plaid
- dzonga 7y ago
  I think they mean, Plaid the Japanese company. one of the biggest analytic firms in asia. & 6.8bn is probably users aggregated over their customers
- ineedasername 7y ago
  And they really don't provide real-time data analysis of 6.8 billion users. At any given time, there aren't even 6.8 billion people awake on the entire planet. Their real-time analysis would be on a vastly smaller subset. Is this too much of a nitpick?
  - hazz99 7y ago
    Them being asleep is still realtime data. The realtime aspect comes from finding out as soon as they wake up.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  "our analysis is counting the same users twice"
nerdbaggy 7y ago
Can anybody find any pricing? I would love to find a managed on prem Kubernetes management thingy that won’t break the bank.
- topkeks 7y ago
  The last time I checked it was at minimum $10,000 per month.
- brown9-2 7y ago
  Pricing is not public: https://cloud.google.com/anthos/gke/docs/on-prem/overview https://cloud.google.com/anthos/gke/docs/on-prem/overview
- scarmig 7y ago
  The pricing is very clear: "Contact Sales."
  - chance_state 7y ago
    Otherwise stated as, "how much you got?"
- ineedasername 7y ago
  I like the old adage: If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  It’s as much a collection of software tools as a service. I don’t know that it even has a price, it may just be free but you have to convince them to let you use it. It’s specifically geared toward people who need a looot of hand-holding, and they probably don’t want to offer that kind of attention to all comers.
- slgeorge 7y ago
  Disclaimer: work for a vendor in this area Anthos is a managed Kubernetes platform: you outsource management of the control plane to Google. If you look at the case studies and the diagrams it's for complex use cases. Altenatives, might be something like Giant Swarm (https://www.giantswarm.io/ https://www.giantswarm.io/), Platform9 or the company I work for Weaveworks (https://www.weave.works/product/enterprise-kubernetes-platform/ https://www.weave.works/product/enterprise-kubernetes-platfo...) If you want to run k8s on-premise and have someone support you then Rancher is popular. Most of the specialist consulting teams will provide support: Jetstack, Fairwinds, Controlplane etc There's lots of options out there - apologies to anyone I missed.
codingslave 7y ago
"In business as in life, change is constant and unpredictable. When building the platforms to power your organization, you can’t be limited by yesterday’s technology decisions. Nor can the systems you create today constrain your ability to act tomorrow. In times of uncertainty, you need an architecture that gives you the agility and flexibility you need to help you weather change—or even take advantage of it." Who are they marketing to??? I feel like I stumbled onto a well written blog aimed at SEO.
- aspaceman 7y ago
  It feels like a marketer trying to use what they learned in school to sell a programmer a framework. If you replace "architecture" with "vehicle" it could be a car commercial. You build up this idea of a person, then the person reading feels if they bought the item, they could be that person. In this case someone who's not "limited by yesterday's technology decisions". Whoever it is sure ain't a good marketer. They really don't know who they're marketing to - some people respond really negatively to this type of copy.
  - Hasu 7y ago
    They aren't selling to individual programmers, they're selling to CTOs and other executives, the people who have the power to make spending decisions on which cloud solution to use. "Whoever it is sure ain't a good marketer. They really don't know who they're marketing to" Or maybe they are a good marketer, and you're the one who doesn't know who they're marketing to? I am not in marketing, but products with ad copy that doesn't entice me at all make billions of dollars.
- derefr 7y ago
  CTOs and CIOs of non-technology companies with IT departments, departments which have a bunch of legacy stuff they're just getting around to deciding how to deprecate/replace. That's the target customer for a lot of the stuff the major cloud providers do, actually. It's the whole focus of IBM's cloud hosting (Softlayer.) It's a majority of what Azure does. Even on AWS, look at any services that aren't pure automagic-IT-for-devs services, but are instead e.g. data-science services (Redshift), or pure ops services (AWS Storage Gateway), or even "IT for non-developers" services (AWS WorkSpaces!), and you'll see the same "CTO-ese." Any IT service that isn't grown through groundswell support by devs, is grown by top-down partner-choice by a CTO.
scarface74 7y ago
Enterprises know they need the cloud to help drive cost efficiency and digital transformation. I’m a cloud true believer and admitted AWS fan (and probably would be an Azure fan too if I had any experience with it), but even Amazon admits that only 5% of Enterprise workloads are in the cloud. “The Enterprise” is leery of the cloud. Even once you can convince a large company to move some of their workloads off prem, most CTO’s wouldn’t touch GCP with a 10 foot pole. No one ever got fired for choosing AWS and many large companies would trust Azure because they are heavily invested in Microsoft. Google is not exactly known for its great enterprise support or customer support in general.
- wmf 7y ago
  No one ever got fired for choosing AWS I think that's the point of this and similar offerings. You get to run on AWS but with even more handholding than AWS enterprise level support.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    It’s used to “manage virtual machines” to help avoid “lock-in”. If all you’re doing is hosting a bunch of virtual machines on your cloud provider, you have the worse of both worlds. You’re paying more for infrastructure and you’re still babysitting hardware. Besides, if you are at any type of scale - you’re de facto already “locked in”. Infrastructure has weight. Data migrations alone are a pain let alone migrating your network infrastructure, you’d permissions (IAM$), auditing for security compliance, your DNS entries, etc. Why add Google to the mix at all if you’re all in on AWS and Azure? I bet few people have ever sat down and work with their project management team or IT people and estimated how long it would take or how much money it would cost to actually migrate to another vendor.
    - wmf 7y ago
      I think these kinds of offerings are for customers who want to use AWS but aren't skilled enough to use AWS directly. Anthos includes VMs and k8s BTW.
- 7y ago
boulos 7y ago
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I'll try to translate this into something direct. Anthos is an umbrella term for things in the combined ecosystem of Kubernetes, Istio, Anthos Config Management, Traffic Director, and so on. Anthos [GKE] on {GCP, AWS, Azure, On-prem} is intended to be a consistent version of this deployed thing in each place. There is an important historical wrinkle where traditional GKE already exists, but was "just Kubernetes" and sometimes "with Istio Add-on". I do not agree with the lack of public pricing. tl;dr: For most people here this is GKE "but wherever you want" (this announcement is "on AWS"), including Istio and friends.
- state_less 7y ago
  Without public prices, this could be anywhere from really relevant and worth considering to overpriced and not worth your time. The price is an important feature. We need something for small and midsize at least. Thanks for the info. I’ve been pretty happy with the designs (K8S, Istio) and services so far (GKE, Cloud Run).
chanux 7y ago
The URL slug is the clearest bit.
alpb 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Google Cloud, helping "developers" understand what Anthos is. (If you criticize my comment, there's a decent change the marketing is gonna have a discussion with my boss about my employment. I'll try not to use as many marketing-y terms as the article.) At a high level, if you're a solo developer or a small company, you probably don't need to understand everything going on there, many Anthos features/products are actually available a la carte, possibly under different names. First, I’ll agree that the blog post is written in a way that might be hard to grasp for hands-on practitioners (assuming I know HN enough, since I visit it 30 times a day). I'll start with an architecture diagram: https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview You might still find this diagram difficult to understand (unless you live with the "cloud-native" stuff day to day) so I'll break this down for you: - Anthos GKE: This is basically the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) you know. But it is now capable of running clusters not just on Google Cloud. If you ever thought "ahh, X cloud doesn't have good Kubernetes support", well Google can bring GKE quality to that cloud (AWS support is now GA, Azure is in preview) or to your on-prem datacenter, or AWS/Azure account. The GKE you know is still available with pay-as-you-go model. I must note that this GKE on-prem/hybrid capabilities are probably the most critical part of Anthos stack. - Anthos Service Mesh: This is Istio (the open source service mesh), set up and managed for you. It helps you (1) connect your services, even if they're across different datacenters or clouds (2) automatically export telemetry like traces, metrics and set up SLOs/alerts with them (3) set policies for your RPC traffic at high level e.g. tcp retry policies should be like X (4) enable mTLS automatically without changing your code across ALL your fleet and without having to run a PKI. (If you're still not convinced about service mesh, you probably don't have a RPC-heavy infra like some companies, maybe you don't need it.) You can technically install/manage Istio yourself across your clusters, but with Anthos, Google does that for you. - Cloud Run for Anthos: This is actually hosted Knative (open source serverless stack on Kubernetes) for you. If you like rapid request-based autoscaling containers, you can have it anywhere (GCP, AWS, on-prem). You can install Knative anywhere, but Google does it for you and ensures it works properly with Istio and Kubernetes versions. I've written a blog post explaining what Knative does here: https://ahmet.im/blog/knative-better-kubernetes-networking/ https://ahmet.im/blog/knative-better-kubernetes-networking/ Basically, this works like a CaaS (containers as a service) or build your own opinionated in-house opinionated PaaS with this. We also offer Cloud Run as a fully-managed serverless product (not running on GKE, runs on Google’s infra directly) if you're into that: https://cloud.run/ https://cloud.run/ - Anthos Config Management: This is available to GKE users as "GKE Config Sync". It's basically a GitOps tool (though not a complete suite like some stuff like Weaveworks Flux etc). You point it to a git repo/branch, and it will go create Kubernetes manifests in that directory across your clusters. It has a pretty neat model where leaf directories correspond to Kubernetes namespace and there's inheritance to fanout Kubernetes policy objects to multiple namespaces etc. AFAIK many companies using Kubernetes at scale build similar in-house solutions to this. So we worked with them to create a solution for everyone. This product also has some policy enforcement features and monitoring to see if your Kubernetes objects are propagating properly to your clusters. - Other components: You'll find them on the page I linked. I think they are not as interesting to the day to day practitioners here. Obviously I've oversimplified many of these, but the docs of each specific product do a decent job explaining, you should read if you're interested. I'd say that if you are a practitioner, you don't need to worry much about details of Anthos. You can continue focus on the technologies you need to know (choose how low-level you wanna go: containers, Kubernetes, RPC or networking layer/service mesh, DevOps/GitOps) and continue to be successful. However, if you work at a company which doesn't haven't gone through the cloud native application modernization (I'm hitting my head on the wall for you for saying this), Anthos can actually help your company use cloud-native stack WITHOUT having to go to cloud. As you might imagine, a ton of companies out there are (perhaps happily) run on infrastructure stacks from another time. However, those looking to change it and try to use Kubernetes, they need to build a lot of in-house tooling, hire talent to manage Kubernetes. Google is decent (maybe more) at running Kubernetes clusters at scale for many customers, so Google can bring this service and all the listed above to you. I'm not that familiar with pricing, though as you can see from https://cloud.google.com/anthos/pricing https://cloud.google.com/anthos/pricing if you want to use these features on just on GCP, there's a $30 vCPU/month cost based on GKE nodes you're running. For other stuff, you need to contact support. I should probably make this a blog post.
WatchDog 7y ago
Interesting definition of general availability. All the technical pages still seem to carry the message: > This product or feature is in a pre-release state and might change or have limited support Pricing directs you to "contact sales" If you do want to try it out, it seems you need to fill out a google docs form. I don't have a great idea about what the product does, but it seems to require use of an active google cloud account. A multi-cloud platform product, having a hard dependency on a single vendor, seems like a non-starter. Doesn't that defeat the main purpose of going multi-cloud in the first place?
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  Anthos is built on Kubernetes, so if you don't like it, you can go run your containers somewhere else. The Anthos promise is that it makes it easy to have a managed Kubernetes service on any cloud or on-prem, with the same management UI and controls. I'm also a bit curious what a multi-cloud platform product not built by a single vendor would look like. Are there any credible OSS offerings in this space?
  - llarsson 7y ago
    Theoretically you will be able to just run your Pods somewhere else, obviously, but if that was all Anthos gave you, then you were not in the target demographic anyway. I am willing to bet, although I have not tried Anthos, that the subset of stuff from your deployment process, identity handling, etc. that will "just work" if you try to move from Anthos to some random vanilla Kubernetes offering will be far too small and that you will practically speaking be locked in to the Anthos platform.
  - yuvalr1 7y ago
    I think that the OSS alternative to this business model is a decentralized app. The hardware sits on many different people's computers around the world instead of a giant center owned by a giant corporation. For example, OrbitDB was discussed here only a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22918467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22918467 Edit: IPFS and this DB give a decentralized storage solution. There might be a decentralized processing solution as well, that I'm not aware of.
jaytaylor 7y ago
Are there any plans for Anthos to support the Oracle OCI cloud?
longtermd 7y ago
I think that's a fantastic strategic move, even though I'm usually not a GCP/ Google fan. The idea that you have to constantly disrupt yourself, and even have to cannibalize your own revenue in business to stay alive, is well understood. An idea, that in my opinion, is generally not understood at all even by CEOs. Most would rather hold on to their last penny until getting disrupted and becoming insignificant.
speedgoose 7y ago
If I have to ask for a price, I'm not going to ask.
hardwaresofton 7y ago
Anthos is just managed Kubernetes. And I thought I was being tinfoil-hat-y about Google's true motives in pushing Kubernetes so hard and the benefits of it being so popular. It enabled the first true cross-cloud experience, that Google just happens to be the creator of and have control over (no matter how much you hear that it's "community driven", the only project I've seen that is actually lives up to that is Rust). Yeah, Kubernetes is massively useful and I'm grateful, but that doesn't stop me from being very cynical about it -- the complexity and learning curve is a consultant's dream (disclaimer: I'm a consultant) and at this point it looks like a 5d chess move to improve their cloud offering by basically backdooring themselves into every single other cloud and the headspace of millions of developers. Condolences to Crossplane[1]. Hyperbole yes, but I do not envy any companies that have to try and compete with Google in the current regulatory (captured) marketplace. If they didn't buy you but entered your space it's gotta be bad news on some level. Luckily, the fact the kubernetes is open source and at least in some part community driven (i.e. the wide ecosystem of plugins) means that companies like Crossplane can still exist if they work hard to out-sell and out-market google, and there is a slim possibility that the barrier to creating a "cloud platform" being lowered so much might mean that all the little mom & pop shop VPS providers and bare metal providers will get in on it, and force the bigger guys to compete on price somewhat (we all know big enterprise is going to go straight to AWS/GCP/Azure anyway). [EDIT] - I just realized that while I was harsh on Crossplane, they arguably just became an extremely valuable acquisition target for every other large cloud provider that wants to buy their way in. Probably not Amazon but Azure/IBM/Orcale/etc probably. [1]: https://crossplane.io/ https://crossplane.io/
- monus 7y ago
  I'm wondering how native Anthos integrate with other clouds. They are standardizing on Kubernetes level, i.e. you can schedule pods from on-prem GKE to AWS cluster. But are you able to use RDS similar to how k8s config connector makes CloudSQL available via CRs? Crossplane has the advantage of being equally integrated to all clouds. Also, if the point of multi-cloud was vendor lock-in, aren't you now GCP locked-in when you use Anthos? It's not open source and may die any time like other Google projects.
  - 7y ago
TimMurnaghan 7y ago
I'd also position this as being up against openshift which is in the managed k8s/hybrid cloud space. Hybrid cloud is definitely a thing as you scale up. For a big enterprise with a significant base load you're paying 5-8 times the cost of on prem for that in a public cloud, so being able to run your own infra for production base load but scale up to the public cloud for dev and burst is a real win.
- slgeorge 7y ago
  The direct competitors to Anthos are whatever the other cloud vendors do here. Anthos and OpenShift are trying to create a 'PaaS-lite', or maybe Orchestration++ is a way to think about it. Alot of the K8s vendors are trying to build a complete experience: for both operators and developers. You can use the CNCF's capabilties (K8s, Prometheus, Istio, etc) to build a container orchestration and developer experience. (Disclaimer - work in this area). Maybe the difference is that OpenShift is quite tightly bound, whereas Anthos is more modular. The complexity is how all the elements are plugged together and the overall life-cycle. NOTE: Weaveworks builds application platforms built from CNCF technology so I definitely have 'opinions' in this space
toshk 7y ago
I was joking a few years ago now Kubernetes is a great layer to manage docker, and then in a few years we will have another layer to manage Kubernetes... Just in general this ever evolving complexity in software (and many other system, like law) is interesting, but often we solve one problem while at the same time creating 5 new ones. I understand it, and sometimes it is indeed the best path forward, but also feel a need for more simplicity sometimes. We see it in both hosting, but frontend development is also very good in adding layers of complexity.
chippy 7y ago
GKE Ingress for Anthos (and possibly other stuff) requires Cloud SDK version 290 or higher which is not currently released, only 289 is. So it's not all available yet. https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/ingress-for-anthos-setup?hl=en https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/ingre...
OldFatCactus 7y ago
I feel like Rancher already does most of this for free
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

189 points by 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

So what does "Google Cloud's fully managed Anthos" do in non-marketing speak? I'm not exactly sure what a "multi-cloud and hybrid application platform" providing "agility and flexibility" is supposed to do for me as a "born-in-the-cloud digital native or a traditional enterprise."

cfors 7y ago
From my understanding it's a managed Istio service.
- igetspam 7y ago
  Thank you. Searching for anthos and istio got me the info I needed. Istio, when finally configured, is pretty fantastic. Leveraging it for multi cloud clusters is already possible so a service that streamlines that feels like a natural step. Terrible blog post. Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out.
  - bogomipz 7y ago
    I'm curious how exactly are people leveraging Istio for multicloud at the moment? Is this via an advanced Istio feature or some other Kubernetes-related project?
    - robertlagrant 7y ago
      You can use Istio for this already, where one cluster is the master: https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/shared-gateways/ https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/share... I've never tried across cloud providers, and so I don't know if latency would be a factor, but I think in theory it could work. You can also join clusters with Istio just for admin and network traffic, i.e. one cluster with Istio in Azure and another cluster with Istio in AWS, talking via the mesh infrastructure. https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/gateways/ https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/gatew...
  - uoaei 7y ago
    > Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out. Unfortunately not even Googlers are immune to the draw to elite signalling by drowning your copy in industry jargon without ever getting to the point. I see this a lot on hastily-composed GitHub Readmes and "rocket-launch" startup landing pages, but it's a shame it also happens to a company whose name is globally recognized.
    - derefr 7y ago
      > the draw to elite signalling I don't feel like that's why we all sometimes do this (though that might be an inside view and I might really be signalling along with everyone else.) I feel like the internal thought-process that motivates this kinds of inside-baseball writing is twofold (depending on the stage of the project): - early on: "the only people who could possibly care about something this new are people with the exact problem it solves, who stumbled onto it when jamming google full of enough keywords that there are zero other results; they already know what this does before reading; and they just want to confirm that it isn't fatally flawed. They're deploying this project in anger. (Of course they are; if they didn't desperately need it, they'd never rely on something so early in development!)" - later on: "We're selling this to customers. We've picked a specific target market that has specific use-cases and needs, and we try to think about things the way they think about things 100% of the time, because talking to those people is what gets us money. We don't do any inbound marketing—we aren't trying to passively educate anyone outside our target market to get them interested. We're having enough trouble capturing the pre-qualified part of our funnel with in-person conversations. Converting people who haven't even fallen into the funnel yet? Who cares! They might get converted by accident if someone who already uses us takes the time to explain our product to them; but otherwise, the only time they'll hear about us is when we reach out to slowly warm them up for a million-dollar enterprise deal."
      - searchableguy 7y ago
        Or they don't care about what you (the engineer) thinks as long as your non-engineer manager is impressed and convinced your team needs it to grow.
- thankswell 7y ago
  Anthos is a multi-cloud software delivery system, i.e. it ships Google Cloud softwares to everywhere including VMware and AWS. Istio is just its traffic/proxy layer across clouds.
- sorum 7y ago
  Istio is part of the service. As far as my knowledge goes, the main components of Anthos are: - Anthos GKE: managed Kubernetes across GCP, AWS, on-prem via VMware vSphere - Anthos service mesh: Istio + SRE practices (Cloud Operations) - Cloud Run: Knative serverless - Anthos Config Mgmt: policy & security automation - Marketplace: 3rd party applications for Anthos Disclaimer: work for Google, but nowhere near an expert on Anthos. Just going off of some notes I took last week.
  - robertlagrant 7y ago
    That's a pretty cool set of things, at least in theory. Wouldn't mind a project where I could try them all out!
thethethethe 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work for GOOG and my opinions are my own My understanding is that Anthos is a multi cloud platform which essentially enables you to run managed Kubernetes on-prem, in GCP, and other public clouds. You can then run other Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Run, on your own hardware or in other clouds in addition to GCP
- londons_explore 7y ago
  How does the billing work? Does the customer pay AWS directly, or does the customer pay Google who pays AWS? If the former, does the service itself depend on Google being up, or could Google go bankrupt and my on-prem hardware keep running Cloud Run?
  - foota 7y ago
    Definitely not the former. I imagine you have to set up some auth stuff for it to work.
    - 411111111111111 7y ago
      How are you certain? Have you worked with anthos before? Technologically both is possible.
      - foota 7y ago
        I haven't, but the liability would be insane.
rmac 7y ago
it's knative, istio, managed gke, a VPN tunnel into other infra, scripts to migrate stuff, and IAM middleware.
- odensc 7y ago
  Thanks... It was near impossible to find a summary like this even on their product page.
rkagerer 7y ago
Glad you asked. Even the main Anthos landing page leaves me scratching my head.
mike_d 7y ago
It's Google's managed kubernetes. But AWS, Azure, and your on-prem hardware appear as availability zones and workloads can shift between them.
- nindalf 7y ago
  Would have been nice if they could have mentioned this in that 1200 word post. Sometimes we criticise folks who read the comments before the link, but crappy links like this train us to do that.
  - xtony 7y ago
    Engineers are probably not the audience of this post.
    - hsaliak 7y ago
      I disagree. Consider it the other way - it is common wisdom to keep broad communications simple enough for a 5 year old to understand. It follows that even marketing speak needs to be so simple that 5 year olds (us, engineers) can understand. Especially so when we are the fortunate users.
- ivankirigin 7y ago
  It's incredible how much better your sentence is than their blog post.
nihil75 7y ago
Every corp has one of these "fully-managed all-in-one just plug in your Java contractors" solutions. Aimed at executives, these stacks run trivial applications at an extreme price, leaving DevOps folks to roll their eyes and ask for a transfer.
- robertlagrant 7y ago
  I really don't think this is what you think it is.
eb0la 7y ago
Anthos was called GkE-on-prem about 1 year ago. It allows you to manage a Kubernetes cluster from GCP that can have resurces mixed from both on-prem and google services (now you can also have pods on AWS). For on-prem you'll need a WMWare hypervisor on your servers. Why this is useful? - Regulation: some workloads can be run only on-prem due to regulation (for instance, in Spain you can only process gambling data in the same region/comunidad autonoma you have the business). - Cloud offloading of K8s workloads - you can workloads onprem off-peak and mixed loads cloud+onprem on peak times. - Google Cloud Marketplace : you can deploy solutions from GCP Marketlplace on Anthos (that is, on your hardware, now also on other clouds). - (now) Onprem + Multicloud workloads: Multicloud is hard. Not just having to know well how stuff works on each cloud, but also having to deal with rough interactions between clouds (even with k8s). Disclaimer: I work for a Google cloud partner.
- gigatexal 7y ago
  The deal breaker for my for me is the VMware component. That licensing is too costly and a silly move imo as if they could do this without that hypervisor and use something free like Xen or KVM they’d have a ton more adoption.
  - eb0la 7y ago
    Google plans to have Anthos on bare metal by year's end. For me that's one of the biggest adoption barriers because unless you already have that VMware licences, you'll have to burn a lot of CapEX to run Anthos. I hope they don't make us pay for both the bare metal license and the by-cpu license (or it is a _very_ small amount).
    - gigatexal 7y ago
      That will be really neat.
    - tyldum 7y ago
      Was quoted a minimum of $10k/month per region. On top of hardware and VMware licenses. Insane.
tonypujals 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Google as a senior developer advocate for Anthos. If you are a hands-on dev (probably the majority of people here), even if you help feed information to the C-suite, I can definitely see how the article probably comes across as "marketing speak" for you. However, I do want to note that having had the opportunity to sit in a number of customer meetings with very large enterprise customers and listen to our VP in conversations with their senior executive leadership, her article is intended to address concerns in a way that resonates with them. This article targets executive decision makers who need to commit enormous resources to long term strategies and it is important for them to hear in a language they understand that they will have enough flexibility to solve existing as well as evolving and shifting needs in the long run. Many customers are trying to navigate their way to a successful modernization path that gives them the ability to run their workloads where they need to, helps them to apply modern best practices, and gives them unified management, monitoring, and compliance and auditing controls. Many of them are on prem and have VMware licenses right now, or have already begun implementing some kind of hybrid cloud strategy, or are even considering multi-cloud approaches. For those of you looking for more practical information, we hear you. We were already preparing to launch new content directly targeted for developers to give you a direct, hands-on experience with Anthos using live clusters and a running application as part of Next. Unfortunately due to changing conditions, we had to take a phased approach to communicating this as part of moving everything to completely digital formats. However, the good news is that you will be able to explore Anthos on Google Cloud for yourself and I'm really looking forward to sharing those details very soon.
- tonypujals 6y ago
  I promised to share some news, so here it is. You can now try out for free. I'm pretty excited about this. The team worked hard to make sure you can spin up a deployment on Anthos with just a few clicks and explore it yourself. Details here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/explore-anthos-with-a-sample-deployment https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/explore-anthos-w...

sbassi 7y ago

Is this product open source? I can't trust Google products since they end it up at any time. https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/

chx 7y ago
https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview https://github.com/istio/istio https://github.com/istio/istio
pseudobry 7y ago
Not saying you're wrong, but I'm having a hard time finding GCP products that had paying enterprise customers at the link you provided, at least none with Greek names.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Not there yet, but Hades is a Greek name: They should name a product Hades and then kill is just so gcemetary has, you know, appropriate oversight & leadership.
ceohockey60 7y ago
Kubernetes, the technology that Anthos manages for users, is open source. The code base that does that managing is not open source afaik.
jasonvorhe 7y ago
This isn't helpful. Google's enterprise offerings are not consumer products that must teach x amount of daily active users in order to survive.

awinter-py 7y ago

> In business as in life, change is constant and unpredictable. When building the platforms to power your organization, you can’t be limited by yesterday’s technology decisions. Nor can the systems you create today constrain your ability to act tomorrow. was expecting 1st paragraph to be 'anthos is a' But I like this too, it's like the philosophy cult ads on the subway the first customer they quote is a 200 yr old bank. 'in my day kubernetes was a lunch place on stone st'

mayank 7y ago

It's quite weird that a Google blog post about a highly technical product doesn't include a link to the actual technical details: https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview

heyoni 7y ago
Thank you. And seriously, that was so much marketing gibberish, I had no idea what they were trying to feed me.
- monkeydust 7y ago
  As someone who feeds up to the 'C suite'.. This is the sort of thing that would hit my inbox and I would have to make sense of it. I think marketing need to realise the C suite is changing.
mike_d 7y ago
They are trying to compete with Azure, which is sold in the boardroom - not to developers. I know of at least one company where they had to blacklist AWS and GCP on corp cards because developers were still trying to use them despite the company having signed a multi-hundred million dollar deal with Azure.
- trhway 7y ago
  >They are trying to compete with Azure, which is sold in the boardroom - not to developers. Looks like an Oracle style approach (couldn't find that famous Larry's quote that developers don't grasp the concerns what he is discussing with the C-suites), and this GCP offering is the first big one under the new GCP leadership transplanted from Oracle. This is probably the new look and feel of GCP going forward.

seph-reed 7y ago

So very tired of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Firefox, and Apple release articles. It's not that I don't understand they're important to a lot of developers and totally belong here. Time to search for a content filter though. Edit: I mean look at it! It's basically an advertisement. It feels like Kardashians of coding.

judge2020 7y ago

> One such early adopter is Plaid, a Japanese tech company providing real-time visibility into user activity online. Plaid’s customers rely on their always-available analytics service to make changes in real-time and continuously improve the user experience. Edit: They're talking about a different company Odd categorization of Plaid, they (at least primarily) provide an API for linking (logging in to) users' bank accounts and scraping information from the bank websites.

sbader 7y ago
It's a different company: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plaid-inc https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plaid-inc
- judge2020 7y ago
  Ah, my bad.

atonse 7y ago

"At Plaid we provide real-time data analysis of over 6.8 billion online users" err what? Not even Facebook has 6.8 billion users. Or probably not even CloudFlare. Is this part of the Visa acquisition? Maybe they'd have that many users but I still kind of doubt "online users."

stevewodil 7y ago
Yeah I thought the total number of people with internet access was under 5 billion. But also, it's a different company, not the fintech Plaid
dzonga 7y ago
I think they mean, Plaid the Japanese company. one of the biggest analytic firms in asia. & 6.8bn is probably users aggregated over their customers
ineedasername 7y ago
And they really don't provide real-time data analysis of 6.8 billion users. At any given time, there aren't even 6.8 billion people awake on the entire planet. Their real-time analysis would be on a vastly smaller subset. Is this too much of a nitpick?
- hazz99 7y ago
  Them being asleep is still realtime data. The realtime aspect comes from finding out as soon as they wake up.
londons_explore 7y ago
"our analysis is counting the same users twice"

nerdbaggy 7y ago

Can anybody find any pricing? I would love to find a managed on prem Kubernetes management thingy that won’t break the bank.

topkeks 7y ago
The last time I checked it was at minimum $10,000 per month.
brown9-2 7y ago
Pricing is not public: https://cloud.google.com/anthos/gke/docs/on-prem/overview https://cloud.google.com/anthos/gke/docs/on-prem/overview
scarmig 7y ago
The pricing is very clear: "Contact Sales."
- chance_state 7y ago
  Otherwise stated as, "how much you got?"
ineedasername 7y ago
I like the old adage: If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
dodobirdlord 7y ago
It’s as much a collection of software tools as a service. I don’t know that it even has a price, it may just be free but you have to convince them to let you use it. It’s specifically geared toward people who need a looot of hand-holding, and they probably don’t want to offer that kind of attention to all comers.
slgeorge 7y ago
Disclaimer: work for a vendor in this area Anthos is a managed Kubernetes platform: you outsource management of the control plane to Google. If you look at the case studies and the diagrams it's for complex use cases. Altenatives, might be something like Giant Swarm (https://www.giantswarm.io/ https://www.giantswarm.io/), Platform9 or the company I work for Weaveworks (https://www.weave.works/product/enterprise-kubernetes-platform/ https://www.weave.works/product/enterprise-kubernetes-platfo...) If you want to run k8s on-premise and have someone support you then Rancher is popular. Most of the specialist consulting teams will provide support: Jetstack, Fairwinds, Controlplane etc There's lots of options out there - apologies to anyone I missed.

codingslave 7y ago

"In business as in life, change is constant and unpredictable. When building the platforms to power your organization, you can’t be limited by yesterday’s technology decisions. Nor can the systems you create today constrain your ability to act tomorrow. In times of uncertainty, you need an architecture that gives you the agility and flexibility you need to help you weather change—or even take advantage of it." Who are they marketing to??? I feel like I stumbled onto a well written blog aimed at SEO.

aspaceman 7y ago
It feels like a marketer trying to use what they learned in school to sell a programmer a framework. If you replace "architecture" with "vehicle" it could be a car commercial. You build up this idea of a person, then the person reading feels if they bought the item, they could be that person. In this case someone who's not "limited by yesterday's technology decisions". Whoever it is sure ain't a good marketer. They really don't know who they're marketing to - some people respond really negatively to this type of copy.
- Hasu 7y ago
  They aren't selling to individual programmers, they're selling to CTOs and other executives, the people who have the power to make spending decisions on which cloud solution to use. "Whoever it is sure ain't a good marketer. They really don't know who they're marketing to" Or maybe they are a good marketer, and you're the one who doesn't know who they're marketing to? I am not in marketing, but products with ad copy that doesn't entice me at all make billions of dollars.
derefr 7y ago
CTOs and CIOs of non-technology companies with IT departments, departments which have a bunch of legacy stuff they're just getting around to deciding how to deprecate/replace. That's the target customer for a lot of the stuff the major cloud providers do, actually. It's the whole focus of IBM's cloud hosting (Softlayer.) It's a majority of what Azure does. Even on AWS, look at any services that aren't pure automagic-IT-for-devs services, but are instead e.g. data-science services (Redshift), or pure ops services (AWS Storage Gateway), or even "IT for non-developers" services (AWS WorkSpaces!), and you'll see the same "CTO-ese." Any IT service that isn't grown through groundswell support by devs, is grown by top-down partner-choice by a CTO.

scarface74 7y ago

Enterprises know they need the cloud to help drive cost efficiency and digital transformation. I’m a cloud true believer and admitted AWS fan (and probably would be an Azure fan too if I had any experience with it), but even Amazon admits that only 5% of Enterprise workloads are in the cloud. “The Enterprise” is leery of the cloud. Even once you can convince a large company to move some of their workloads off prem, most CTO’s wouldn’t touch GCP with a 10 foot pole. No one ever got fired for choosing AWS and many large companies would trust Azure because they are heavily invested in Microsoft. Google is not exactly known for its great enterprise support or customer support in general.

wmf 7y ago
No one ever got fired for choosing AWS I think that's the point of this and similar offerings. You get to run on AWS but with even more handholding than AWS enterprise level support.
- scarface74 7y ago
  It’s used to “manage virtual machines” to help avoid “lock-in”. If all you’re doing is hosting a bunch of virtual machines on your cloud provider, you have the worse of both worlds. You’re paying more for infrastructure and you’re still babysitting hardware. Besides, if you are at any type of scale - you’re de facto already “locked in”. Infrastructure has weight. Data migrations alone are a pain let alone migrating your network infrastructure, you’d permissions (IAM$), auditing for security compliance, your DNS entries, etc. Why add Google to the mix at all if you’re all in on AWS and Azure? I bet few people have ever sat down and work with their project management team or IT people and estimated how long it would take or how much money it would cost to actually migrate to another vendor.
  - wmf 7y ago
    I think these kinds of offerings are for customers who want to use AWS but aren't skilled enough to use AWS directly. Anthos includes VMs and k8s BTW.
7y ago

boulos 7y ago

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I'll try to translate this into something direct. Anthos is an umbrella term for things in the combined ecosystem of Kubernetes, Istio, Anthos Config Management, Traffic Director, and so on. Anthos [GKE] on {GCP, AWS, Azure, On-prem} is intended to be a consistent version of this deployed thing in each place. There is an important historical wrinkle where traditional GKE already exists, but was "just Kubernetes" and sometimes "with Istio Add-on". I do not agree with the lack of public pricing. tl;dr: For most people here this is GKE "but wherever you want" (this announcement is "on AWS"), including Istio and friends.

state_less 7y ago
Without public prices, this could be anywhere from really relevant and worth considering to overpriced and not worth your time. The price is an important feature. We need something for small and midsize at least. Thanks for the info. I’ve been pretty happy with the designs (K8S, Istio) and services so far (GKE, Cloud Run).

chanux 7y ago

The URL slug is the clearest bit.

alpb 7y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Google Cloud, helping "developers" understand what Anthos is. (If you criticize my comment, there's a decent change the marketing is gonna have a discussion with my boss about my employment. I'll try not to use as many marketing-y terms as the article.) At a high level, if you're a solo developer or a small company, you probably don't need to understand everything going on there, many Anthos features/products are actually available a la carte, possibly under different names. First, I’ll agree that the blog post is written in a way that might be hard to grasp for hands-on practitioners (assuming I know HN enough, since I visit it 30 times a day). I'll start with an architecture diagram: https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview You might still find this diagram difficult to understand (unless you live with the "cloud-native" stuff day to day) so I'll break this down for you: - Anthos GKE: This is basically the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) you know. But it is now capable of running clusters not just on Google Cloud. If you ever thought "ahh, X cloud doesn't have good Kubernetes support", well Google can bring GKE quality to that cloud (AWS support is now GA, Azure is in preview) or to your on-prem datacenter, or AWS/Azure account. The GKE you know is still available with pay-as-you-go model. I must note that this GKE on-prem/hybrid capabilities are probably the most critical part of Anthos stack. - Anthos Service Mesh: This is Istio (the open source service mesh), set up and managed for you. It helps you (1) connect your services, even if they're across different datacenters or clouds (2) automatically export telemetry like traces, metrics and set up SLOs/alerts with them (3) set policies for your RPC traffic at high level e.g. tcp retry policies should be like X (4) enable mTLS automatically without changing your code across ALL your fleet and without having to run a PKI. (If you're still not convinced about service mesh, you probably don't have a RPC-heavy infra like some companies, maybe you don't need it.) You can technically install/manage Istio yourself across your clusters, but with Anthos, Google does that for you. - Cloud Run for Anthos: This is actually hosted Knative (open source serverless stack on Kubernetes) for you. If you like rapid request-based autoscaling containers, you can have it anywhere (GCP, AWS, on-prem). You can install Knative anywhere, but Google does it for you and ensures it works properly with Istio and Kubernetes versions. I've written a blog post explaining what Knative does here: https://ahmet.im/blog/knative-better-kubernetes-networking/ https://ahmet.im/blog/knative-better-kubernetes-networking/ Basically, this works like a CaaS (containers as a service) or build your own opinionated in-house opinionated PaaS with this. We also offer Cloud Run as a fully-managed serverless product (not running on GKE, runs on Google’s infra directly) if you're into that: https://cloud.run/ https://cloud.run/ - Anthos Config Management: This is available to GKE users as "GKE Config Sync". It's basically a GitOps tool (though not a complete suite like some stuff like Weaveworks Flux etc). You point it to a git repo/branch, and it will go create Kubernetes manifests in that directory across your clusters. It has a pretty neat model where leaf directories correspond to Kubernetes namespace and there's inheritance to fanout Kubernetes policy objects to multiple namespaces etc. AFAIK many companies using Kubernetes at scale build similar in-house solutions to this. So we worked with them to create a solution for everyone. This product also has some policy enforcement features and monitoring to see if your Kubernetes objects are propagating properly to your clusters. - Other components: You'll find them on the page I linked. I think they are not as interesting to the day to day practitioners here. Obviously I've oversimplified many of these, but the docs of each specific product do a decent job explaining, you should read if you're interested. I'd say that if you are a practitioner, you don't need to worry much about details of Anthos. You can continue focus on the technologies you need to know (choose how low-level you wanna go: containers, Kubernetes, RPC or networking layer/service mesh, DevOps/GitOps) and continue to be successful. However, if you work at a company which doesn't haven't gone through the cloud native application modernization (I'm hitting my head on the wall for you for saying this), Anthos can actually help your company use cloud-native stack WITHOUT having to go to cloud. As you might imagine, a ton of companies out there are (perhaps happily) run on infrastructure stacks from another time. However, those looking to change it and try to use Kubernetes, they need to build a lot of in-house tooling, hire talent to manage Kubernetes. Google is decent (maybe more) at running Kubernetes clusters at scale for many customers, so Google can bring this service and all the listed above to you. I'm not that familiar with pricing, though as you can see from https://cloud.google.com/anthos/pricing https://cloud.google.com/anthos/pricing if you want to use these features on just on GCP, there's a $30 vCPU/month cost based on GKE nodes you're running. For other stuff, you need to contact support. I should probably make this a blog post.

WatchDog 7y ago

Interesting definition of general availability. All the technical pages still seem to carry the message: > This product or feature is in a pre-release state and might change or have limited support Pricing directs you to "contact sales" If you do want to try it out, it seems you need to fill out a google docs form. I don't have a great idea about what the product does, but it seems to require use of an active google cloud account. A multi-cloud platform product, having a hard dependency on a single vendor, seems like a non-starter. Doesn't that defeat the main purpose of going multi-cloud in the first place?

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
Anthos is built on Kubernetes, so if you don't like it, you can go run your containers somewhere else. The Anthos promise is that it makes it easy to have a managed Kubernetes service on any cloud or on-prem, with the same management UI and controls. I'm also a bit curious what a multi-cloud platform product not built by a single vendor would look like. Are there any credible OSS offerings in this space?
- llarsson 7y ago
  Theoretically you will be able to just run your Pods somewhere else, obviously, but if that was all Anthos gave you, then you were not in the target demographic anyway. I am willing to bet, although I have not tried Anthos, that the subset of stuff from your deployment process, identity handling, etc. that will "just work" if you try to move from Anthos to some random vanilla Kubernetes offering will be far too small and that you will practically speaking be locked in to the Anthos platform.
- yuvalr1 7y ago
  I think that the OSS alternative to this business model is a decentralized app. The hardware sits on many different people's computers around the world instead of a giant center owned by a giant corporation. For example, OrbitDB was discussed here only a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22918467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22918467 Edit: IPFS and this DB give a decentralized storage solution. There might be a decentralized processing solution as well, that I'm not aware of.

jaytaylor 7y ago

Are there any plans for Anthos to support the Oracle OCI cloud?

longtermd 7y ago

I think that's a fantastic strategic move, even though I'm usually not a GCP/ Google fan. The idea that you have to constantly disrupt yourself, and even have to cannibalize your own revenue in business to stay alive, is well understood. An idea, that in my opinion, is generally not understood at all even by CEOs. Most would rather hold on to their last penny until getting disrupted and becoming insignificant.

speedgoose 7y ago

If I have to ask for a price, I'm not going to ask.

hardwaresofton 7y ago

Anthos is just managed Kubernetes. And I thought I was being tinfoil-hat-y about Google's true motives in pushing Kubernetes so hard and the benefits of it being so popular. It enabled the first true cross-cloud experience, that Google just happens to be the creator of and have control over (no matter how much you hear that it's "community driven", the only project I've seen that is actually lives up to that is Rust). Yeah, Kubernetes is massively useful and I'm grateful, but that doesn't stop me from being very cynical about it -- the complexity and learning curve is a consultant's dream (disclaimer: I'm a consultant) and at this point it looks like a 5d chess move to improve their cloud offering by basically backdooring themselves into every single other cloud and the headspace of millions of developers. Condolences to Crossplane[1]. Hyperbole yes, but I do not envy any companies that have to try and compete with Google in the current regulatory (captured) marketplace. If they didn't buy you but entered your space it's gotta be bad news on some level. Luckily, the fact the kubernetes is open source and at least in some part community driven (i.e. the wide ecosystem of plugins) means that companies like Crossplane can still exist if they work hard to out-sell and out-market google, and there is a slim possibility that the barrier to creating a "cloud platform" being lowered so much might mean that all the little mom & pop shop VPS providers and bare metal providers will get in on it, and force the bigger guys to compete on price somewhat (we all know big enterprise is going to go straight to AWS/GCP/Azure anyway). [EDIT] - I just realized that while I was harsh on Crossplane, they arguably just became an extremely valuable acquisition target for every other large cloud provider that wants to buy their way in. Probably not Amazon but Azure/IBM/Orcale/etc probably. [1]: https://crossplane.io/ https://crossplane.io/

monus 7y ago
I'm wondering how native Anthos integrate with other clouds. They are standardizing on Kubernetes level, i.e. you can schedule pods from on-prem GKE to AWS cluster. But are you able to use RDS similar to how k8s config connector makes CloudSQL available via CRs? Crossplane has the advantage of being equally integrated to all clouds. Also, if the point of multi-cloud was vendor lock-in, aren't you now GCP locked-in when you use Anthos? It's not open source and may die any time like other Google projects.
- 7y ago

TimMurnaghan 7y ago

I'd also position this as being up against openshift which is in the managed k8s/hybrid cloud space. Hybrid cloud is definitely a thing as you scale up. For a big enterprise with a significant base load you're paying 5-8 times the cost of on prem for that in a public cloud, so being able to run your own infra for production base load but scale up to the public cloud for dev and burst is a real win.

slgeorge 7y ago
The direct competitors to Anthos are whatever the other cloud vendors do here. Anthos and OpenShift are trying to create a 'PaaS-lite', or maybe Orchestration++ is a way to think about it. Alot of the K8s vendors are trying to build a complete experience: for both operators and developers. You can use the CNCF's capabilties (K8s, Prometheus, Istio, etc) to build a container orchestration and developer experience. (Disclaimer - work in this area). Maybe the difference is that OpenShift is quite tightly bound, whereas Anthos is more modular. The complexity is how all the elements are plugged together and the overall life-cycle. NOTE: Weaveworks builds application platforms built from CNCF technology so I definitely have 'opinions' in this space

toshk 7y ago

I was joking a few years ago now Kubernetes is a great layer to manage docker, and then in a few years we will have another layer to manage Kubernetes... Just in general this ever evolving complexity in software (and many other system, like law) is interesting, but often we solve one problem while at the same time creating 5 new ones. I understand it, and sometimes it is indeed the best path forward, but also feel a need for more simplicity sometimes. We see it in both hosting, but frontend development is also very good in adding layers of complexity.

chippy 7y ago

GKE Ingress for Anthos (and possibly other stuff) requires Cloud SDK version 290 or higher which is not currently released, only 289 is. So it's not all available yet. https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/ingress-for-anthos-setup?hl=en https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/ingre...

OldFatCactus 7y ago

I feel like Rancher already does most of this for free

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]