6 ms·

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" providin

by odensc 6y 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 6y ago
From my understanding it's a managed Istio service.
- igetspam 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
    Definitely not the former. I imagine you have to set up some auth stuff for it to work.
    - 411111111111111 6y ago
      How are you certain? Have you worked with anthos before? Technologically both is possible.
      - foota 6y ago
        I haven't, but the liability would be insane.
rmac 6y ago
it's knative, istio, managed gke, a VPN tunnel into other infra, scripts to migrate stuff, and IAM middleware.
- odensc 6y ago
  Thanks... It was near impossible to find a summary like this even on their product page.
rkagerer 6y ago
Glad you asked. Even the main Anthos landing page leaves me scratching my head.
mike_d 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
    Engineers are probably not the audience of this post.
    - hsaliak 6y 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 6y ago
  It's incredible how much better your sentence is than their blog post.
nihil75 6y 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 6y ago
  I really don't think this is what you think it is.
eb0la 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
      That will be really neat.
    - tyldum 6y ago
      Was quoted a minimum of $10k/month per region. On top of hardware and VMware licenses. Insane.
tonypujals 6y 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...

by odensc 6y ago

cfors 6y ago

From my understanding it's a managed Istio service.

igetspam 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
  Definitely not the former. I imagine you have to set up some auth stuff for it to work.
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    How are you certain? Have you worked with anthos before? Technologically both is possible.
    - foota 6y ago
      I haven't, but the liability would be insane.

rmac 6y ago

it's knative, istio, managed gke, a VPN tunnel into other infra, scripts to migrate stuff, and IAM middleware.

odensc 6y ago
Thanks... It was near impossible to find a summary like this even on their product page.

rkagerer 6y ago

Glad you asked. Even the main Anthos landing page leaves me scratching my head.

mike_d 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
  Engineers are probably not the audience of this post.
  - hsaliak 6y 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 6y ago
It's incredible how much better your sentence is than their blog post.

nihil75 6y 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 6y ago
I really don't think this is what you think it is.

eb0la 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
    That will be really neat.
  - tyldum 6y ago
    Was quoted a minimum of $10k/month per region. On top of hardware and VMware licenses. Insane.

tonypujals 6y 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...